Xia Li ^1* Jing Ji ²

• ¹ China Agricultural University, Beijing, China
• ² Shanghai Midu Information Technology, Shanghai, China

Food safety is intrinsically characterized by information asymmetry, which the internet era has the potential to alleviate by providing a "natural" information environment. This study investigates how consumer network attention, triggered by major pig epidemics, influences pork price fluctuations, with a focus on the roles of information dissemination and emotion transmission. African Swine Fever (ASF) serves as a case study to illustrate this mechanism. Monthly provincial panel data from June 2021 to November 2022 were collected using web scraping techniques and social network analysis, with Weibo user repost and emotion transmission networks constructed to integrate social network structures into the analytical framework. The findings reveal that, first, consumer network attention significantly intensifies pork price volatility during major epidemics, with notable heterogeneity across different information environments. Second, both information dissemination and emotion transmission play moderating roles in this process. Specifically, the media information index negatively moderates the relationship between consumer attention and pork price fluctuations. The betweenness centrality of the Weibo repost network (i.e., the importance of nodes serving as "bridges" in the network) also negatively moderates this relationship, indicating that "opinion leaders" on social media effectively mitigate the impact of consumer attention on price fluctuations through selective information dissemination. In contrast, the closeness centrality of the emotion transmission network (i.e., efficiency in emotion dissemination) has a positive moderating effect, highlighting how rapid emotion propagation amplifies the speed and intensity of market reactions. This paper highlights the economic implications of weak relationship networks during food safety crises and underscores the importance of leveraging social media dynamics to enhance food market stability. The study's novelty lies in the systematic application of social network analysis using social media data to the economic analysis of agricultural market behavior, providing new empirical evidence and methodological perspectives for understanding and utilizing social media dynamics to optimize food market policies.