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Purpose: This study aims to profile the government microbloggers and evaluate their roles. The results can help improve the governments' response capability to public emergencies. Design/methodology/approach: This study proposes the user profiling and role evaluation model of government microbloggers in the context of public emergencies. The indicators are designed from the four dimensions of time, content, scale and influence, and the feature labels are identified. Three different public emergencies were investigated, including the West Africa Ebola outbreak, the Middle East respiratory syndrome outbreak and the Shandong vaccine case in China. Findings: The results found that most government microbloggers were follower responders, short-term participants, originators, occasional participants and low influencers. The role distribution of government microbloggers was highly concentrated. However, in terms of individual profiles, the role of a government microblogger varied with events. Social implications: The findings can provide a reference for the performance assessment of the government microbloggers in the context of public emergencies and help them improve their ability to communicate with the public and respond to public emergencies. Originality/value: By analyzing the performance of government microbloggers from the four dimensions of time, content, scale and influence, this paper fills the gap in existing literature on designing the user profiling and role evaluation model of government microbloggers in the context of public emergencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]