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| Autori principali: | , , , , , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
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| Soggetti: | |
| Accesso online: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19536 |
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| _version_ | 1866911530938793984 |
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| author | Chen, Yiheng Hagen, Alina Yang, Fan Dougherty, Ratna B. Ma, Zihui Li, Lingyao Yu, Runlong |
| author_facet | Chen, Yiheng Hagen, Alina Yang, Fan Dougherty, Ratna B. Ma, Zihui Li, Lingyao Yu, Runlong |
| contents | Wildfires require governments to communicate under conditions of urgency, uncertainty, and intense public scrutiny, yet such communication now unfolds within a digitally mediated environment shaped by polarization and engagement-based amplification. We analyze over 1.3 million wildfire-related social media posts from California (2016-2025) to examine how institutional actors are evaluated within this landscape. Users' stance toward government is actor-specific: individual political officials are discussed more negatively than operational agencies across federal, state, and local levels, and this gap widens during extreme wildfire events. Moreover, interaction networks become increasingly modular over time, consolidating into polarized communities in which negativity concentrates within cohesive clusters. Engagement-weighted measures show that highly interactive negative content disproportionately shapes visible discourse, while crisis periods redirect attention from emergency agencies to high-profile political figures, reinforcing reputational divergence. These findings indicate that wildfire communication operates within a polarized, engagement-ranked ecosystem in which evaluative tone, network structure, and visibility dynamics jointly shape institutional perception. Effective disaster communication should therefore account for the structural conditions of contemporary digital public communities. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_19536 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Politicized Attention Shifts Amplify Polarization in the Information Ecosystem during California Wildfires Chen, Yiheng Hagen, Alina Yang, Fan Dougherty, Ratna B. Ma, Zihui Li, Lingyao Yu, Runlong Social and Information Networks Wildfires require governments to communicate under conditions of urgency, uncertainty, and intense public scrutiny, yet such communication now unfolds within a digitally mediated environment shaped by polarization and engagement-based amplification. We analyze over 1.3 million wildfire-related social media posts from California (2016-2025) to examine how institutional actors are evaluated within this landscape. Users' stance toward government is actor-specific: individual political officials are discussed more negatively than operational agencies across federal, state, and local levels, and this gap widens during extreme wildfire events. Moreover, interaction networks become increasingly modular over time, consolidating into polarized communities in which negativity concentrates within cohesive clusters. Engagement-weighted measures show that highly interactive negative content disproportionately shapes visible discourse, while crisis periods redirect attention from emergency agencies to high-profile political figures, reinforcing reputational divergence. These findings indicate that wildfire communication operates within a polarized, engagement-ranked ecosystem in which evaluative tone, network structure, and visibility dynamics jointly shape institutional perception. Effective disaster communication should therefore account for the structural conditions of contemporary digital public communities. |
| title | Politicized Attention Shifts Amplify Polarization in the Information Ecosystem during California Wildfires |
| topic | Social and Information Networks |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19536 |