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Dynamic evolution of information diffusion networks of news agencies in emergencies: a case study of microblogs of urban fire disasters on Sina Weibo

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Abstract

Critical to information diffusion, influential news agencies can publicize emergencies on social media platforms, not only helping to guide public opinion and enhance the public’s situational awareness and responsiveness to emergencies, but also reducing social panic, rumor propagation, and negative public opinions during emergencies. To study diffusion patterns of emergency information, postings and repostings about 11 urban fire disasters on 35 original microblogs posted by the two most influential news agencies were collected and analyzed by exploring the law of dynamic information diffusion and the evolution of the topology structure during peak diffusion. Results showed that the topological structures of the information diffusion networks (IDN) of news agencies comprise superstar, N-star, galaxy, ring, and comprehensive structures, characterized by topological structure and numerical characteristics such as reposting rate. In the dynamic evolution of IDN, the comprehensive structure has the best information diffusion and control, and thus serves to optimize the timely and effective management of emergency information on social media platforms. The out-degrees of the most dominant hub node in this structure achieved 2000, which is nearly 5–10 times that of the other structures. This work fills the gap in the combination of dynamical topological and statistical characteristics evolution by analyzing the topological evolution and statistical characteristics of networks. The findings of this study can be applicable to similar disasters and social media platforms.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant number: 71974025), the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant number: 2021YFC3300201) and the Dalian Science and Technology Innovation Project (Grant number: 2022JJ12GX012). We would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable and constructive comments on improving the paper and Editage (www.editage.com) for English language editing. We would also like to thank Xiaoyan Su for her critical support in data acquisition.

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  1. School of Economics and Management, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China

    Xuelong Chen, Yiping Chen, Guojie Yin & Hanyue He

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  1. Xuelong Chen
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Chen, X., Chen, Y., Yin, G. et al. Dynamic evolution of information diffusion networks of news agencies in emergencies: a case study of microblogs of urban fire disasters on Sina Weibo. Multimed Tools Appl 83, 25287–25319 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-16498-0

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