The Evolutionary Game Analysis of Public Opinion on Pollution Control in the Citizen Journalism Environment

Abstract

In the context of the rapid development of new media such as network citizen journalism, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to use the online public opinion to supervise sewage discharge enterprises’ emission governance behaviors and improve the social opinion supervision mechanism. This paper considers the dynamic characteristics of the spread process of public opinion and the game process of social supervision on corporate pollution control; constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model of the local government, sewage discharge enterprises, and the public by coupling the susceptible–exposed–infected–removed (SEIR) model and the evolutionary game model; and discusses the influence laws of public opinion spread on the tripartite evolutionary game. The results show that (1) the public with higher influence or authority has a more significant restraint effect to restrain the pollution control behavior of the local government and pollutant companies by using online public opinion supervision. (2) Increasing the probability of transforming a latent person into a supervisor and the topic derivative rate or reducing the probability of a supervisor’s self-healing can increase the peak value of supervisors, expand the scope of social public opinion, and improve the effectiveness of public opinion supervision. (3) The relatively high authenticity of public opinion supervision makes public opinion supervision a substitute for local government supervision, but it has a relatively strong inhibitory effect on the over-standard pollutant discharge behavior of sewage discharge enterprises. These conclusions can provide a reference for improving the social supervision mechanism of pollution control in the era of network citizen journalism.