Abstract
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.
Highlights
With leading the development of the we-media era, social media recipients are news receivers, and turning into news producers and disseminators
We examine the relationships between rumor engagement and intervention by using a unique user-aggregated dataset collected from a Chinese leading online social media platform, namely Sina Weibo, through empirical data-driven simulation analyses
Based on the above analysis of the interactive infection process of multiple public rumor engagers and the summary of role transition paths, we further propose a theoretical model to explore when the intervention strategies, what kind of engagers and what direction and intensity of intervention should be taken, which is conducive to effectively control the overall evolution of the rumor engagement in the field of public opinion
Summary
With leading the development of the we-media era, social media recipients are news receivers, and turning into news producers and disseminators. Rumor engagement refers to the psychological state of immersion and existence when people interact with unverified news or interpersonal communication around hot events of public opinion in the network situation, which can be externalized and presented in some actual behaviors (such as posting, commenting, sharing, liking, tagging, etc.) after emotional and cognitive processing [6,7]. The change of psychological cognition and attitude caused by the transition of social psychological stress response state will, in turn, affect the externalized expression of public opinion and the change of rumor engagement state In this process, the important role of the crisis management person is to act as a bridge between the damaged external actual world and the threatened internal public psychological world, as well as promote the rumor engagers to transform into rational immune groups.
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