School of Economics and Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Beihang University, Beijing, China.
Front Public Health. 2022 May 13;10:765581. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.765581. eCollection 2022.
The COVID-19 outbreak triggered a massive spread of unverified news on social media and has become a source of rumors. This paper studies the impact of a virtual rumor control center (RCC) on Weibo user behavior. The collected COVID-19 breaking news stories were divided into positive, negative, and neutral categories, while the moderating effect model was used to analyze the influence of anti-rumor on user behavior (forwarding, liking, and commenting). Our research found that rumor refuting does not directly affect user behavior but does have an indirect moderating effect. Rumor refuting has a profound impact on user forwarding behavior in cases of positive and negative news. Specifically, when the epidemic becomes more serious, the role of rumor refuting becomes critical, and vice versa. Refuting rumors reduces user willingness to forward positive or negative news, with more impact on negative news. Time lag analysis shows a significant moderation of unverified news within 72 h of refuting rumors but indicated an apparent weakening trend over time. Furthermore, we discovered non-linear feature and counter-cyclical phenomena in the moderating effect of rumor refutation.
新冠疫情爆发后，社交媒体上大量未经证实的疫情信息迅速传播，谣言四起。本文研究了微博上的一个虚拟谣言控制中心（RCC）对用户行为的影响。我们将收集到的新冠疫情突发新闻分为积极、消极和中性三类，并采用调节效应模型分析了反谣言对用户行为（转发、点赞和评论）的影响。研究发现，辟谣并不直接影响用户行为，但具有间接的调节作用。在积极和消极新闻中，辟谣对用户转发行为有深远影响。具体来说，当疫情变得更加严重时，辟谣的作用至关重要，反之亦然。辟谣会降低用户转发积极或消极新闻的意愿，对消极新闻的影响更大。时滞分析表明，在辟谣后 72 小时内，未经证实的新闻存在显著的调节作用，但随着时间的推移，这种作用明显减弱。此外，我们还发现了辟谣调节效应中的非线性特征和反周期性现象。
