Environmental disaster and public rescue: A social media perspective

Abstract

Resilient city construction requires cities to be able to cope with and resist disasters on their own. With the advent and explosive growth of social media such as microblogs, citizens manage to show strong presence in disaster relief and the construction of resilient cities, which has resulted a huge amount of user-generated data. This paper took China's heavy rain disaster in 2021 as an example, collected 111,248 messages on the Chinese microblog platform, and analyzed the reactions of citizens during emergency rescue as social media users. Results show that social media users play an important role in disseminating disaster information, and the topics discussed by users follow the characteristics of information transmission before emotional expression. By analyzing the emotions exhibited by social media users, we discover that users are particularly concerned about whether information would be accurately and efficiently disseminated. Social media users seldom express emotions when publishing information, and a few users have a negative attitude in the face of disasters. Meanwhile, by examining the influence of different social media on disaster relief, we find that government's official media along with other news media acts as the main information disseminator, while influential individual bloggers serve as the main mediators in the information dissemination process. This paper on the whole offers a new lens for analyzing the role played by social media users in disaster relief, the implications of which could be referred to by the public and government agencies, so as to improve the city's adaptability to disasters through cooperative production and accelerate the construction of resilient cities.