How Collective Intelligence Restrains the Rumor Spreading in Emergencies?

Abstract

When communicating online under COVID-19 epidemic in 2020, all kinds of rumors are widely spread on the Internet. Coming with the spread of virus, the rumor spreading not only threaten the public health, but also facilitate panic and destroy the harmony of society. This study took the COVID-19 epidemic, a serious public health emergency, as an example. Firstly, we build up a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) containing the influential factors of Collective Intelligence on unconfirmed information dissemination (UID) on social media, and then conduct an empirical test based on the survey data. The results show that the use of Collective Intelligence can restrain the spread of rumor in public health emergencies, among which critical thinking, collective refutation and proof, crowdsourcing and member heterogeneity are the main restraining factors. However, opinion leaders would facilitate the spread of rumor. This paper not only enriches the theory of Collective Intelligence and rumor management, but also has important practical significance for suppressing rumor spreading during the emergencies.