Abstract
Public opinions play an important role in the formation of Not in My Back Yard (NIMBY) conflict environmental mass events. Due to the continual interactions between affected groups and the corresponding government responses surrounding the public interests related to health, online public opinion structure reversal arises frequently in NIMBY conflict events, which pose a serious threat to social public security. To explore the underlying mechanism, this paper introduces an improved dynamic model which considers multiple heterogeneities in health concerns and social power of individuals and in government’s ability. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model can provide an accurate description of the entire process of online public opinion structure reversal in NIMBY conflict environmental mass incidents on the Internet. In particular, the proportion of the individual agents without health interest appeals will delay the online public opinion structure reversal, and the upper threshold remains within regulatory limits from 0.4 to 0.5. Unlike some previous results that show that the guiding powers of the opinion leaders varied over its ratio in a fixed-sized group, our results suggest that the impact of opinion leaders is of no significant difference for the time of structure reversal after it increased to about 6%. Furthermore, a double threshold effect of online structure reversal during the government’s response process was observed. The findings are beneficial for understanding and explaining the process of online public opinion structure reversal in NIMBY conflict environmental mass incidents, and provides theoretical and practical implications for guiding public or personal health opinions on the Internet and for a governments’ effective response to them.
Highlights
A larger number of urban public facilities advocated by the governmental agents can benefit from the development of cities as a whole, e.g., the nuclear power plants and waste infrastructures, the proximate residents usually oppose and resist them once they believe that their living environmental and personal health are compromised, causing environmental mass events [1]
In this paper an improved model is proposed which introduces interest appeal in health concerns and social power of individuals to reflect the influence of individual internal characteristics on their attitudes, as well introduces the heterogeneous abilities of the government agency to depict the effect of external intervention on individual opinions, so as to explore the process of online public opinion structure reversal in mass incidents using the agent-based method
The process is repeated before the system becomes steady, and the impact of heterogeneous features on the structure reversal of public opinion of Not in My Back Yard (NIMBY) conflict event is measured by steady state and
Summary
A larger number of urban public facilities advocated by the governmental agents can benefit from the development of cities as a whole, e.g., the nuclear power plants and waste infrastructures, the proximate residents usually oppose and resist them once they believe that their living environmental and personal health are compromised, causing environmental mass events [1]. Due to the large population of netizens and small-world features possessed by social networks [4], e.g., Weibo, Wechat, Twitter and Facebook, the affected groups usually tend to employ it to intensely propagate public opinions on this type of events This is because the traits of social contradiction would not be the same to that in the online society as the capabilities regarding discourse power, information acquisition and resonance of ordinary citizens have been enhanced by social community [3]. This research seeks to propose an improved model to investigate the structure reversal of online public opinions of NIMBY facility development considering multiple heterogeneities of individual health concerns and government responses simultaneously.
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