A comparative analysis for spatio-temporal spreading patterns of emergency news

Understanding the propagation characteristics of online emergency news communication is of great importance to guiding emergency management and supporting the dissemination of vital information. However, existing methods are limited to the analysis of the dissemination of online information pertaining to a specific disaster event. To study the quantification of the general spreading patterns and unique dynamic evolution of emergency-related information, we build a systematic, comprehensive evaluation framework and apply it to 81 million reposts from Sina Weibo, Chinese largest online microblogging platform, and perform a comparative analysis with four other types of online information (political, social, techs, and entertainment news). We find that the spreading of emergency news generally exhibits a shorter life cycle, a shorter active period, and fewer fluctuations in the aftermath of the peak than other types of news, while propagation is limited to a few steps from the source. Furthermore, compared with other types of news, fewer users tend to repost the same piece of news multiple times, while user influence (which depends on the number of fans) has the least impact on the number of reposts for news of emergencies. These comparative results provide insights that will be useful in the context of disaster relief, emergency management, and other communication path prediction applications.