Social Media Discourse in Disaster Situations A Study of the Deadly July 21, 2012 Beijing Rainstorm

Abstract : The July 21, 2012 Beijing rainstorm was a devastating catastrophe that caused 79 deaths, raising a great deal of attention all over the world. This research aims to explore emotions, attitudes, and views of citizens during the period surrounding this major rainstorm from a social media perspective. The results show that first the rainstorm-related posts of micro-bloggers in Beijing outnumbered that in Hebei, which also outnumbered the other provinces of China. Second, within the most reposted Weibo posts, a strong proportion is storm related and private bloggers are found to be more influential than government agencies. Third, the four district groups in the Beijing metropolitan region expressed a high-low-high sentiment before, during and after the rainstorm, respectively, and a quite uneven trend was observed across the different groups. Topics extracted through LDA modeling also exhibited a striking space-time pattern.