Social Media Behavior and Emotional Evolution during Emergency Events.

Mingyun Gu,Haixiang Guo,Jun Zhuang

doi:10.3390/healthcare9091109

Abstract

Online social networks have recently become a vital source for emergency event news and the consequent venting of emotions. However, knowledge on what drives user emotion and behavioral responses to emergency event developments are still limited. Therefore, unlike previous studies that have only explored trending themes and public sentiment in social media, this study sought to develop a holistic framework to assess the impact of emergency developments on emotions and behavior by exploring the evolution of trending themes and public sentiments in social media posts as a focal event developed. By examining the event timelines and the associated hashtags on the popular Chinese social media site Sina-Weibo, the 2019 Wuxi viaduct collapse accident was taken as the research object and the event timeline and the Sina-Weibo tagging function focused on to analyze the behaviors and emotional changes in the social media users and elucidate the correlations. It can conclude that: (i) There were some social media rules being adhered to and that new focused news from the same event impacted user behavior and the popularity of previous thematic discussions. (ii) While the most critical function for users appeared to express their emotions, the user foci changed when recent focus news emerged. (iii) As the news of the collapse deepened, the change in user sentiment was found to be positively correlated with the information released by personal-authentication accounts. This research provides a new perspective on the extraction of information from social media platforms in emergencies and social-emotional transmission rules.

Highlights

IntroductionSocial media is widely followed by billions of people because of its focus on human activities [1], with the information generated and disseminated an essential part of many people’s everyday lives [2]
Viaduct Collapse” as the research object to examine the evolution of social media activities after emergencies and analyze the emotional changes in the user populations
Data from different themes under the same accident were analyzed to develop a framework to track the evolution of the social media user behavior and public sentiment and analyze their correlations

Summary

Introduction

Social media is widely followed by billions of people because of its focus on human activities [1], with the information generated and disseminated an essential part of many people’s everyday lives [2]. Even though much of this information is created and disseminated by ordinary users, many people rely on their social media feeds for news about trending events [3,4,5,6], public opinion [7,8,9], market analyses [10,11,12] and influencers [13,14,15,16]. Users create status messages and give their opinions on wide range of topics [17]. Sina-Weibo allows users to interact with others using tools such as mention (@, @username, which means that the message sender is willing to share this post with the user/users mentioned, retweet, which means the users are usually forwarding messages they are interested in from other users, hashtag (##, contents between## refer to a specific topic), and like, which is when users agree with messages posted by other users [18]

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion