Affective and cognitive features of comments added by forwarders in Sina Weibo during disasters

Abstract

In Sina Weibo, users are allowed to add comments to the shared post when forwarding, and if the shared post is non‐original, previous forwarders' comments will be automatically kept. Notwithstanding the growing body of literature on social media usage in emergencies, little is known about the comments added by forwarders. This study aims to explore affective and cognitive features of comments added by forwarders and its difference with the original posts during multiple emergency events. We conducted the analysis on 72,712 added comments to 9,408 original posts about the three disasters. The result suggests that the added comments by forwarders and the original posts show different characteristics in cognition and emotion, and the emotional and cognitive expressions of added comments were significantly different between man‐made disasters and natural disasters. This study provides a new perspective for exploring the forwarding behavior in disaster situations.