Abstract
Social media is an important tool for disaster prevention and management. To reveal the public responses to disasters on social media in the context of East Asian culture, an urban flood disaster event that occurred in Wuhan City, China, in the summer of 2016 was selected as a case. Data were collected from Sina-Weibo, which is the earliest and most popular social media platform in China. We categorized a total of 17,047 messages into four types, analyzed the Pearson correlation between information dissemination and precipitation, and identified the important accounts and their messages in the social networks by visualized analysis. The results show that there is a one-day lag between participation and public response. Message dissemination has a steeply downward trend over time, that is, a long tail effect. Information disseminates quickly within two hours, and then dissemination declines after four hours, with opinion messages disseminating faster than other types of messages. Famous news organizations and several celebrities play a leading role in social networks. In general, the participation of Chinese netizens in disaster events is lower than that of people in Western countries, and social media is not yet used as a tool for disaster response.
Highlights
Social media refers to internet-based applications that enable people to communicate and share resources and information through conversation and interaction [1,2]
There are some related studies, we found that most of them focus on disaster events in Western countries using data from several common social media platforms [5,6,10,12,27,28,33]
This paper aims to (1) determine how well the social media (Sina-Weibo) has been used as a communication tool in urban flood disaster management, (2) determine how long the time lag is from the beginning of rainfall to widespread public response to flood events on Sina-Weibo, (3) identify which kind of message has the fastest dissemination speed and what message content has slow heat attenuation, and (4) explore which accounts play a leading role in the social media network during the flood event in the context of East Asian culture
Summary
Social media refers to internet-based applications that enable people to communicate and share resources and information through conversation and interaction [1,2]. Facebook is the most popular social media platform with 2.2 billion active users distributed across 119 countries worldwide, followed by Instagram with 600 million active users. Comment, and repost any message on social media, and it takes only a short time to obtain and share information. For these reasons, social media networks have emerged as a powerful tool in allowing the collaboration and sharing of information during times of disasters. As early as 2011, scholars began to pay attention to the use of social media during natural disasters. The public began to pay more attention to social media and participate more in social media than before
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