Study On The Network Public Opinion Of Public Health And Safety Events

Public health and security incidents are closely associated with people’s healthand security. Once there appears such an incident, it would draw attention from thepublic immediately. In recent years, the frequent occurrences of these incidents havemade the public’s nerves very sensitive. Under such circumstances, the growingirrationality and conflicts can easily result in public sentiment crisis. Thus, it is oftheoretical and practical significance to study online public sentiments systematically.Compared with the public sentiments of regular public incidents, public healthand security incidents are featured as with extremely wide spread range, spontaneityin information transmission, closeness with public welfare, negative tendency,easiness in triggering group behavior and continuity of their impacts. When taking amicro perspective and analyzing the transmission rules of the public sentiments onpublic health and security incidents, it is found that the transmission shows strongspontaneity and obvious synergistic effect and butterfly effect. The positive feedbackeffect collects strength and triggers the self-organized behavior. While taking a mesoperspective, it can be found that the online public sentiments are evolving in threeways namely singlet, doublet and multimodal. In terms of a micro perspective, it isfound that the agenda of these incidents are rheological. The initiator of the topics isdiverse. Thus the construction of the topics is multi-interactive, producing multimotivators of these topics, including traditional media, opinion leader and commoncyber citizens.Improper handle of online public sentiments will result in crisis. During thecurrent stage, this kind of crisis includes emergence of social instability, arouse ofgovernment credibility crisis and panic group behavior. There exist problems such asostrichism, delay of response and blind denial in the current ways of fighting againstthese crisis. It is suggested that in order to facilitate the sound development of onlinepublic sentiments of public health and security incidents, the government should setup overall alert system and quick-response mechanism, effective guiding system aswell as to implement legal regulations on public health.