The use of the Internet by older adults will contribute to the sustainable development of society. Existing studies have extensively investigated the influencing factors that affect older people’s use of the Internet, but ignored the behaviors of the people around them. Using data from China Family Panel Studies, we investigated the influence of peer effects on the Internet use of older people. It was found that, the stronger that peer effects are, the higher the level of Internet use among older adults. This conclusion still holds after a robustness test. The peer effects are more obvious in rural areas, due to closer community interaction. In addition, this study proves that peer effects promote Internet use by increasing the perceived importance of the Internet through mediation tests. The findings highlight the positive effects of social interaction on the Internet among older people, which is conducive to the improvement of policy practice.

The development of social media has brought new challenges to government risk communication, and the public has put forward higher requirements for emotionality, novelty, and interactivity in communicating risk information. Based on this, the Chinese emergency government has adopted a new expression on social media platforms—cute discourse. The emergency government’s use of cute discourse to mitigate negative public emotions and enhance information attraction. Although there is a large number of studies on government risk communication on social media, there is a lack of research on the effectiveness of using this new expression. In this study, we analyzed the 11,152 emergency government’s posts on Weibo in China and assessed the impact of the use of cute discourse on risk communication effect under a mixed research method. The results show that within the range of sample values, the use and degree of the emergency government’s cute discourse improves communication effectiveness. Additionally, the driving effect of the use and degree of the emergency government’s cute discourse on risk communication varied across crisis types, risk stages, and risk themes. These results provide novel approaches and new perspectives for the study of governmental risk communication discourse.

Relieving the emotions of the public through government response is an important part of government emergency management. How governments respond in different situations can avoid stimulating negative emotions during emergencies? This paper analyzes the problem from the perspective of configuration; that is, this paper explores the combined effects of multiple factors on emotions. We construct the theoretical framework “Situation-Responder-Content” from situation, responder and response content, and use the government microblogs (n= 1517) from 23 major production accidents in China for the discussion with the use of fuzzy set qualitative comparison analysis (fsQCA). According to the results, the effective response types of different agencies in emergencies are summarized. Local authorities can respond in ways that include “Measures type” and “Measures-Emotion type”. Functional agencies can respond through “Measures type”, “Measures-Emotion type” and “Government feature-Driven” type. This study emphasizes that government response in emergencies is a systematic process. Responsive agencies need to release effective information on the basis of fully considering the situation and other factors. Configuration analysis should also be an important direction in government response research, which is helpful to the practice of government response in emergencies.