Know it to Defeat it: Exploring Health Rumor Characteristics and Debunking Efforts on Chinese Social Media during COVID-19 Crisis

TL;DR

This study analyzes health rumors and debunking efforts on Chinese social media during COVID-19, revealing how rumor types and user roles influence discussion dynamics and debunking effectiveness.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth analysis of health rumor characteristics, user roles, and debunking strategies during COVID-19 on Weibo, filling a research gap in crisis informatics.

Findings

Dread-type rumors provoke more discussion and last longer.

Different user groups prefer distinct debunking strategies.

Timely debunking effectively suppresses rumor spread.

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.