Institute of Journalism and Communication, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing 100021, China.
Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Change Management, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Shanghai 201620, China.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Feb 10;19(4):1988. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19041988.
During major public health emergencies, a series of coupling problems of rumors getting out of control and public psychological imbalance always emerge in social media, which bring great interference for crisis disposal. From the perspective of social psychological stress, it is important to depict the interactive infection law among distinct types of rumor engagers (i.e., advocates, supporters, and amplifiers) under different social psychological stress states, and explore the effectiveness of rumor intervention strategies (i.e., hindering and persuasion) from multiple dimensions, to scientifically predict the situation of public opinion field and guide the public to restore psychological stability. Therefore, this paper constructs an interactive infection model of multiple rumor engagers under different intervention situations based on a unique user-aggregated dataset collected from a Chinese leading online microblogging platform ("Sina Weibo") during the COVID-19 in 2020. The simulation result shows that (1) in the period of social psychological alarm reaction, the strong level of hindering intervention on the rumor engagers leads to more serious negative consequences; (2) in the period of social psychological resistance, the persuasion and hindering strategies can both produce good outcomes, which can effectively reduce the overall scale of rumor supporters and amplifiers and shorten their survival time in social media; (3) in the period of social psychological exhaustion, rumor intervention strategies are not able to have a significant impact; (4) the greater the intensity of intervention, the more obvious the outcome. Experimental findings provide a solid research basis for enhancing social psychological stress outcomes and offer decision-making references to formulate the rumor combating scheme.
在重大突发公共卫生事件中，社交媒体中时常会出现谣言失控和公众心理失衡的一系列耦合问题，这给危机处置带来了很大的干扰。从社会心理应激的角度出发，刻画不同社会心理应激状态下不同类型谣言传播者（即倡议者、支持者和放大者）之间的交互感染规律，从多个维度探索谣言干预策略（即阻碍和劝导）的有效性，科学预测舆论场态势，引导公众心理恢复平稳，具有重要意义。因此，本文基于 2020 年中国某领先的在线微博平台（“新浪微博”）在新冠疫情期间采集的独特用户聚合数据集，构建了一个多谣言传播者在不同干预情境下的交互感染模型。仿真结果表明：（1）在社会心理警报反应期，对谣言传播者的强干预水平会导致更严重的负面后果；（2）在社会心理抵抗期，劝导和阻碍策略都能产生良好的结果，可以有效降低谣言支持者和放大者的整体规模，并缩短他们在社交媒体中的存活时间；（3）在社会心理疲惫期，谣言干预策略无法产生显著影响；（4）干预强度越大，效果越明显。实验结果为增强社会心理应激结果提供了坚实的研究基础，并为制定谣言打击方案提供了决策参考。
