Spatiotemporal pattern evolution and influencing factors of online public opinion——Evidence from the early-stage of COVID-19 in China

With the rapid development of internet information technology, online public opinion's influence is infinitely magnified, seriously threatening social security and national governance. It is significant to clarify the spatial and temporal evolution rules of online public opinion on major epidemics and its influencing factors for the governance and guidance of online public opinion on major epidemics. In this paper, the spatiotemporal evolution analysis model of online public opinion and an analysis model of influencing factors were constructed. We selected the Baidu index and microblog crawler text data at the early stage of COVID-19 as the research objects and analyzed the evolution of online public opinion during the time period by using the optimal segmentation method, spatial autocorrelation analysis, and text analysis method. The spatiotemporal evolutionary influences and their influence are further analyzed using the geographic probe factor detection method. The results showed that the evolution of online public opinion in the early stage of the epidemic was closely related to the event's evolution and the prevention and control effect. In the time dimension, the early evolution of online public opinion has prominent periodic characteristics. In the geospatial dimension, there are significant spatial agglomeration effects and spillover effects. In the cyberspace dimension, there are significant differences in online public opinion heat, hot topics, and netizens' emotional tendencies at different stages. Furthermore, the severity of the epidemic, the number of Internet users, the number of media reports and the region's attributes jointly affect the spatial and temporal evolution pattern of online public opinions about the epidemic. The research results provide decision-making references for the government and planners to effectively manage online public opinion on emergencies and improve the government's public opinion governance capacity and level.