Know it to Defeat it: Exploring Health Rumor Characteristics and Debunking Efforts on Chinese Social Media during COVID-19 Crisis
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by
Wenjie Yang, Sitong Wang, Zhenhui Peng, Chuhan Shi, Xiaojuan Ma, Diyi Yang
2021
Abstract
Health-related rumors spreading online during a public crisis may pose a
serious threat to people's well-being. Existing crisis informatics research
lacks in-depth insights into the characteristics of health rumors and the
efforts to debunk them on social media in a pandemic. To fill this gap, we
conduct a comprehensive analysis of four months of rumor-related online
discussion during COVID-19 on Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site. Results
suggest that the dread (cause fear) type of health rumors provoked
significantly more discussions and lasted longer than the wish (raise hope)
type. We further explore how four kinds of social media users (i.e.,
government, media, organization, and individual) combat health rumors, and
identify their preferred way of sharing debunking information and the key
rhetoric strategies used in the process. We examine the relationship between
debunking and rumor discussions using a Granger causality approach, and show
the efficacy of debunking in suppressing rumor discussions, which is
time-sensitive and varies across rumor types and debunkers. Our results can
provide insights into crisis informatics and risk management on social media in
pandemic settings.
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