School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China.
Center for Studies of Information Resources, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China.
J Med Internet Res. 2021 Mar 25;23(3):e27009. doi: 10.2196/27009.
The dissemination of rumor rebuttal content on social media is vital for rumor control and disease containment during public health crises. Previous research on the effectiveness of rumor rebuttal, to a certain extent, ignored or simplified the structure of dissemination networks and users' cognition as well as decision-making and interaction behaviors.
This study aimed to roughly evaluate the effectiveness of rumor rebuttal; dig deeply into the attitude-based echo chamber effect on users' responses to rumor rebuttal under multiple topics on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, in the early stage of the COVID-19 epidemic; and evaluate the echo chamber's impact on the information characteristics of user interaction content.
We used Sina Weibo's application programming interface to crawl rumor rebuttal content related to COVID-19 from 10 AM on January 23, 2020, to midnight on April 8, 2020. Using content analysis, sentiment analysis, social network analysis, and statistical analysis, we first analyzed whether and to what extent there was an echo chamber effect on the shaping of individuals' attitudes when retweeting or commenting on others' tweets. Then, we tested the heterogeneity of attitude distribution within communities and the homophily of interactions between communities. Based on the results at user and community levels, we made comprehensive judgments. Finally, we examined users' interaction content from three dimensions-sentiment expression, information seeking and sharing, and civility-to test the impact of the echo chamber effect.
Our results indicated that the retweeting mechanism played an essential role in promoting polarization, and the commenting mechanism played a role in consensus building. Our results showed that there might not be a significant echo chamber effect on community interactions and verified that, compared to like-minded interactions, cross-cutting interactions contained significantly more negative sentiment, information seeking and sharing, and incivility. We found that online users' information-seeking behavior was accompanied by incivility, and information-sharing behavior was accompanied by more negative sentiment, which was often accompanied by incivility.
Our findings revealed the existence and degree of an echo chamber effect from multiple dimensions, such as topic, interaction mechanism, and interaction level, and its impact on interaction content. Based on these findings, we provide several suggestions for preventing or alleviating group polarization to achieve better rumor rebuttal.
在公共卫生危机期间，社交媒体上谣言驳斥内容的传播对于谣言控制和疾病遏制至关重要。之前关于谣言驳斥效果的研究，在一定程度上忽略或简化了传播网络的结构以及用户的认知、决策和互动行为。
本研究旨在粗略评估谣言驳斥的效果；深入挖掘在微博（中国社交媒体平台）上 COVID-19 疫情早期针对多个主题的谣言驳斥下，基于态度的回音壁效应对用户回应的影响；并评估回音壁对用户互动内容信息特征的影响。
我们使用新浪微博的应用程序接口，从 2020 年 1 月 23 日上午 10 点到 2020 年 4 月 8 日午夜，抓取与 COVID-19 相关的谣言驳斥内容。使用内容分析、情感分析、社会网络分析和统计分析，我们首先分析在转发或评论他人推文时，基于态度的回音壁效应对个人态度形成的影响，以及在多大程度上产生影响。然后，我们测试了社区内态度分布的异质性以及社区间互动的同质性。基于用户和社区层面的结果，我们做出了全面的判断。最后，我们从情感表达、信息寻求与分享以及文明性三个维度检验用户的互动内容，以检验回音壁效应的影响。
我们的结果表明，转发机制在促进极化方面发挥了重要作用，而评论机制则在达成共识方面发挥了作用。我们的结果表明，社区互动中可能没有显著的回音壁效应，并且验证了与志同道合的互动相比，交叉互动包含了更多的负面情绪、信息寻求与分享以及不文明行为。我们发现，在线用户的信息寻求行为伴随着不文明行为，而信息分享行为伴随着更多的负面情绪，且往往伴随着不文明行为。
我们的研究结果揭示了从多个维度（如主题、互动机制和互动层面）存在和程度的回音壁效应，及其对互动内容的影响。基于这些发现，我们为防止或减轻群体极化以实现更好的谣言驳斥提供了几点建议。
