Analysis of Information Dissemination of Emergencies Based on Weibo User Characteristics

Abstract

[Purpose/Significance] With the popularity and development of social media, Weibo has become an important information transmission platform. Understanding the law of emergency information transmission based on the characteristics of Weibo users is of great significance for grasping the development trend of events, evaluating the influence of information, and formulating effective response strategies. [Methods/Process] Selecting typical cases of four types of emergencies (natural disasters, accidents, public health events, and social security events) as the research objects, this paper crawled the user data of the information transmission on the Weibo platform and analyzed the distributions of user gender, user geographical distribution, user attention and fan number and user type of the information transmission for these events, in order to reveal the differences and similarities of the user characteristics and transmission laws for the four types of emergencies. [Results/Conclusions] As for the similarities of the user characteristics and transmission laws, first, the audiences of the four types of emergencies have obvious regional characteristics, and the users in economically developed provinces generally have a higher attention rate. Second, the transmission users of all types of emergencies are generally concentrated on active users and grassroot users with strong and weak propagation power respectively, accompanied by a small number of authoritative users with strong influence. However, there are differences in the broadness and gender distribution of the audiences for different types of emergencies. First, natural disasters have a wider spread of the audiences and relatively higher attentiveness; accidents and public health events tend to be local events with relatively low attentiveness, whose audiences may be more concentrated in and around the affected areas; the audience spread of social security events is scattered depending on the nature of the event, the scope of influence as well as the communication channels. Second, female users pay more attention to natural disasters, public health events and social security events, while male users pay more attention to accidents, which can be attributed to the different emotional orientations and psychological characteristics associated with users of different genders. These results provide insights for the formulation of targeted guidance strategies for information dissemination. In future studies, we will collect data on other social media platforms, obtain more information on user characteristics through different channels, and introduce more in-depth analysis methods and indicators to comprehensively reveal the dynamic mechanisms of emergency information dissemination, thus improving the accuracy and effectiveness of the research.

Keywords

• social media|weibo|information dissemination|user characteristics|emergency