Exploring Arsenic danger awareness in the Polish Copper Basin via network simulation - preliminary results

TL;DR

This study uses agent-based modeling on social networks to analyze how information about arsenic danger spreads in the Polish Copper Basin, revealing that high danger levels can overcome hub blocking to achieve widespread awareness.

Contribution

It introduces a model of information spread considering hub immunity on Barabasi-Albert networks applied to real environmental danger data.

Findings

High danger levels enable successful information spread despite hub blocking.

Hubs can inhibit information flow at low danger levels.

Agent-based modeling reveals thresholds for effective awareness dissemination.

Abstract

Information spread plays crucial role in risk management in case of environmental danger. The structure of local society may be well described by social network analysis. We have investigated the role of hubs within that concept. In case of danger, there are two different strategies of information management: 1) information spread that leads to awareness of the whole society 2) keeping the whole information in secret under control that leads to a partial social awareness, available to a small number of people only. In our model, the probability of information spread between two nodes is inverse proportional to connectivity of the next node because people who have a lot of connections are more immune. We have applied agent-based modelling on Barabasi Albert networks to explore various scenarios of information spread. We have considered recent arsenic environmental danger in G{\l}og\'ow and Legnica (Copper Basin) according to the official available data (2015 - 2016) from social network analysis point of view. We have considered various levels of environmental danger. Despite blocking of information by hubs, the successful information spread is possible when levels of danger are high enough. The perception and impression of information spread by society is also.