An Empirical Study of Information Diffusion in Micro-blogging Systems during Emergency Events

Understanding the rapid information diffusion process in social media is critical for crisis management. Most of existing studies mainly focus on information diffusion patterns under the word-of-mouth spread mechanism. However, to date, the mass-media spread mechanism in social media is still not well studied. In this paper, we take the emergency event of Wenzhou train crash as a case and conduct an empirical analysis, utilizing geospatial correlation analysis and social network analysis, to explore the mass-meida spread mechanism in social media. By using the approach of agent-based modeling, we further make a quantativiely comparison with the information diffusion patterns under the word-of-mouth spread mechanism. Our exprimental results show that the mass-meida spread mechanism plays a more important role than that of the word-of-mouth in the information diffusion process during emergency events. The results of this paper can provide significant potential implications for crisis management.