A Tale of Two Cities: Information Diffusion During Environmental Crises in Flint, Michigan and East Palestine, Ohio

Abstract

While information about some environmental crises rapidly spreads following the initial event, other crises, such as the Flint Water Crisis (FWC), take years to garner national attention. Understanding the spread of information from local to national scales is important, as this spread is often necessary to receive recognition and resources. One way to understand these dynamics is to use information diffusion models, which have been used to investigate information spread during crises. Though there have been several studies on why the FWC took so long to reach national attention, such modeling techniques have not been used to gain additional insights into factors that may contribute to this delay. To address this gap, our study uses an independent cascade diffusion model to examine the information spreading dynamics of two environmental crises: the FWC and the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Our results demonstrate how standard independent cascade models, despite adequately capturing a fast-spreading crisis, may not be sufficient to explain the dynamics of a delayed diffusion. Flint’s dynamics were only captured by manipulating the contagiousness parameter throughout the simulation, implying that social factors hindered its ability to fit the diffusion paradigm of unimpeded spread.