Evaluating Social Media Response to Urban Flood Disaster: Case Study on an East Asian City (Wuhan, China)

Social media is an important tool for disaster prevention and management. To reveal the public responses to disasters on social media in the context of East Asian culture, an urban flood disaster event that occurred in Wuhan City, China, in the summer of 2016 was selected as a case. Data were collected from Sina-Weibo, which is the earliest and most popular social media platform in China. We categorized a total of 17,047 messages into four types, analyzed the Pearson correlation between information dissemination and precipitation, and identified the important accounts and their messages in the social networks by visualized analysis. The results show that there is a one-day lag between participation and public response. Message dissemination has a steeply downward trend over time, that is, a long tail effect. Information disseminates quickly within two hours, and then dissemination declines after four hours, with opinion messages disseminating faster than other types of messages. Famous news organizations and several celebrities play a leading role in social networks. In general, the participation of Chinese netizens in disaster events is lower than that of people in Western countries, and social media is not yet used as a tool for disaster response.