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1. Introduction
Natural disaster events are unpredictable and seriously destructive, which not only pose a threat to people’s lives and wealth, but also easily induce negative emotions, causing emotional crisis. Especially in the “post-truth” era, emotion surpasses truth as the main driving force of information dissemination (Hameleers and Yekta, 2023). Some information with strong emotions, with the fundamental goal of obtaining views, likes and comments and with the main means of exaggerating the truth and fabricating facts, incites the emotions of netizens and creates confusion in social cognition (Deng and Chau, 2021; Goldenberg and Willer, 2023). Moreover, with the help of new media platforms, emotional information is rapidly fermented through social networks, which has a serious impact on social stability (Kim and Chen, 2022). In this context, it is increasingly important to mine and understand the mechanism of emotional information dissemination in natural disaster events.
Kramer et al. (2014) and Brady et al. (2017) have found that emotions form a transmission network in the process of infection, and spread and strengthen under the influence of interpersonal relationships. Emotional information is similar to information, following step flow models (Yi et al., 2022).Users with high influence can expand the radiation range of emotional information (Naskar et al., 2020), and may also influence the emotional state of the public (Goldenberg et al., 2016; Liu and Liu, 2023) In the emotional network, users with high influence are regarded as super-spreaders, and the emotional information they publish will be widely disseminated, which greatly affects the public's cognition and emotion (Gao et al., 2023). Therefore, identifying super-spreaders has become a central key to recognizing the mechanism of emotion propagation.
In the new media era, internet audiences participate in information dissemination through different ways (Mak et al., 2024). The direct communication between participants at different levels undermines the effectiveness of the dichotomy of mass communication and interpersonal communication (O'Sullivan and Carr, 2018). The two-step flow communication theory is difficult to describe the sharing behavior of information in online networks (Mohammadi et al., 2016). Therefore, the multi-level communication theory has been proposed, which suggests that the process of information dissemination in society is multi-level, and there may be several levels of super-spreaders from the source...