Measurement and analysis on microblog network of emergency topic

Abstract

With the development of new technology and new media, traditional mainstream media is no longer the only protagonist of emergency reporting, microblog has played an irreplaceable role in emergency reporting, topic transmission and public opinion spread. In order to find out the topological characteristics of emergency transmission in microblog, in this paper, we measured the most popular microblog system in China - Sina Microblog, and compared our experiment results with the existing online social networks, found that the network topology of Sina Microblog network of emergency topic has following characteristics: 1) 77% of users who participate in emergency topic discussion follow each other; 2) Distribution of outdegree and indegree of the network is approximate to the power-law distribution; 3) The network has small-world properties; 4) The outdegree and indegree of the network have no correlation; 5) The network has no assortativity. These measurement result are very important for further study on the propagation rules of emergencies in the microblog network, and provide important basis and foundation for the prediction of topic trend.