Social Cognition Construction of the Avian Flu based on Social Media Big Data

During the high incidence of avian flu, the mainstream media and social media report a lot on the epidemic, mobilizing the people to prevent and control avian flu. This paper collects reports on avian flu from News, Forums, Apps, WeChat and Microblog and forms five data sets. We extract agenda-settings from the News dataset and build agenda-setting networks of the five datasets. Then we use the QAP test to verify the relevance of these agenda-setting networks. We also project the agenda-setting dissimilarity matrices into a two-dimensional space using the MDS method to form cognitive maps, analyzing the cognitive drift of media platforms relative to News. Results show that the agenda-setting networks of Apps and News have the highest correlation coefficient of 0.9193, while Microblog and News have the lowest correlation coefficient of 0.5611. The cognitive maps of Apps, Forum and WeChat have a slight translation and rotation relative to the cognitive map of News. But their relative positional relationship among agenda-settings are similar with News, expect Microblog.