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Severity assessment and the early warning mechanism of public events based on the comparison of microblogging characteristics

Miaomiao Chen (Center for Studies of Information Resources, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China) (School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China)
Lu An (Center for Studies of Information Resources, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China) (School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China)
Gang Li (Center for Studies of Information Resources, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China)
Chuanming Yu (School of Information and Safety Engineering, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China)

Information Technology & People

ISSN: 0959-3845

Article publication date: 23 September 2022

Issue publication date: 8 September 2023

292

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of the study is to evaluate the severity of public events in real time from the perspective of social media and to construct the early warning mechanism of public events.

Design/methodology/approach

This study constructed the severity assessment system of public events from the dimensions of the netizens' role, the Internet media's role, the spread of public events and the attitudes and feelings of netizens. The method of analyzing the influence tendency of the public event severity indicators was proposed. A total of 1,107,308 microblogging entries regarding four public events were investigated. The severity of public events was divided into four levels.

Findings

It is found that serious public events have higher indicator values than medium level events on the microblogging platform. A quantitative severity classification standard for public events was established and the early warning mechanism of public events was built.

Research limitations/implications

Microblogging and other social media platforms provide rich clues for the real-time study and judgment of public events. This study only investigated the Weibo platform as the data source. Other social media platforms can also be considered in future.

Originality/value

Different from the ex-post evaluation method of judging the severity of public events based on their physical loss, this study constructed a quantitative method to dynamically determine the severity of public events according to the clues reflected by social media. The results can help the emergency management departments judge the severity of public events objectively and reduce the subjective negligence and misjudgment.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful for the valuable comments and suggestions from the editor and reviewers. This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72174153, 71921002, 71790612, and 71974202) and the Major Project of the Ministry of Education of China (Grant No. 17JZD034).

Citation

Chen, M., An, L., Li, G. and Yu, C. (2023), "Severity assessment and the early warning mechanism of public events based on the comparison of microblogging characteristics", Information Technology & People, Vol. 36 No. 6, pp. 2543-2562. https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-12-2021-0991

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited

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