Empirically Analyzing the Role of a Peak in Online Emergency Information Dissemination

When an emergency occurs, as a factor in online emergency information dissemination, the peak represents the maximum strength and turning point. However, the role of these peaks in emergencies is still unclear. In this article, we try to disentangle this problem and investigate the effect of these peaks on the lifecycle and influence of online emergency information dissemination. We first propose an Online Emergency Information Dissemination Process (OEIDP) model drawing from the ideas of system cybernetics and system identification to present the emergency lifecycle with a decay parameter, time constant, and delay parameter. Based on this model, we then analyze the effect of peaks using empirical data from the Weibo, WeChat, and 20000 media platforms of 169 emergencies. The results reveal the positive significant impacts of the peak time, peak volume, and spikes on emergency information dissemination. The results enable us to make accurate judgements when facing peaks and remind us of the need to balance the strongest manifestation and final influence. Our work complements the gaps on the peak effect in the existing communication literature and introduces the concept of system cybernetics to solve information dissemination which provides a new direction for future studies to solve related problems using system control techniques.