Internet public opinion dissemination mechanism of COVID-19: evidence from the Shuanghuanglian event
Data Technologies and Applications
ISSN: 2514-9288
Article publication date: 12 October 2021
Issue publication date: 15 March 2022
Abstract
Purpose
The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has become a major public health emergency of global concern. Studying the Internet public opinion dissemination mechanism of public health emergencies is of great significance for creating a legalized network environment, and it is also helpful for managers to make scientific decisions when encountering Internet public opinion crisis.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on the analysis of the process of spreading the Internet public opinion in major epidemics, a dynamic model of the Internet public opinion spread system was constructed to study the interactive relationship among the public opinion events, network media, netizens and government and the spread of epidemic public opinion. The Shuanghuanglian event in COVID-19 in China was taken as a typical example to make simulation analysis.
Findings
Research results show three points: (1) the government credibility plays a decisive role in the spread of Internet public opinion; (2) it is the best time to intervene when Internet public opinion occurred at first time; (3) the management and control of social media are the key to public opinion governance. Besides, specific countermeasures are proposed to assist control of Internet public opinion dissemination.
Originality/value
The epidemic Internet public opinion risk evolution system is a complex nonlinear social system. The system dynamics model is used to carry out research to facilitate the analysis of the Internet public opinion propagation mechanism and explore the interrelationship of various factors.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Jiayin Qi for her help and support in making this work possible.
Contributions: The author contributions are as follows: Xing Zhang (first author): Conceptualization, funding acquisition, formal analysis, methodology, project administration supervision, writing-original draft preparation; Yan Zhou (corresponding author): methodology, investigation, software, validation, writing-review and editing, writing–original draft; Fuli Zhou (Coauthor): data curation, methodology, formal analysis, investigation, validation; Saurabh Pratap (Coauthor): Conceptualization, design, supervision. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Declaration of conflicting interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding: The work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China's special project (72042004), General Project of Humanities and Social Sciences Research in Henan Province (2021-ZZJH-444) and Henan Province Philosophy and Social Science Planning Programme (2020CZH012).
Citation
Zhang, X., Zhou, Y., Zhou, F. and Pratap, S. (2022), "Internet public opinion dissemination mechanism of COVID-19: evidence from the Shuanghuanglian event", Data Technologies and Applications, Vol. 56 No. 2, pp. 283-302. https://doi.org/10.1108/DTA-11-2020-0275
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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