Assessing Risk Communication in Social Media for Crisis Prevention: A Social Network Analysis of Microblog

This article examines risk communication and perception differences via social media in the context of crisis management. Based on data from the Shifang Protest, this study constructed a relational matrix identifying how critical actors facilitated risk communication and interactions. In addition, the article identified measures of network structure and risk perception differences with Social Network Analysis (i.e. density, centralization, structure holes and subgroups) using UCINET software program along visual structures with NetDraw. Key findings of this study include: a) ranked actors controlled most of the information resources and threat diffusion; b) the level of interaction between government users and others users is extremely low; and c) divergence occurred between personal (informal) and official (formal) nodes in the context of risk perception.