학술논문
Content Characteristics and Transmission Strategies of Social Media Rumors in China: Big Data Analysis of WeChat Rumors
Document Type
Conference
Author
Source
2019 6th International Conference on Behavioral, Economic and Socio-Cultural Computing (BESC) Behavioral, Economic and Socio-Cultural Computing (BESC), 2019 6th International Conference on. :1-5 Oct, 2019
Subject
Language
Abstract
Understanding the characteristics and patterns of rumors on social media has become one of the key issues of rumor governance. However, there is some empirical evidence about the characteristics of rumors on WeChat, the most popular social media platform in China with more than 800 million users. To investigate the content characteristics and transmission strategies of rumors on WeChat, we collected 2175 rumor articles from WeChat from April 2015 to March 2016. It was found that political and societal rumors accounted for the highest proportion of rumors on WeChat. The proportion of positive emotional words found in the most popular rumors was significantly higher than that in the least popular rumors. Further analysis of rumor transmission strategies indicated that nearly one-third of the rumors have the interactive characteristics of induced sharing. Rumor articles on WeChat were mostly published around people's leisure time and holidays. Most articles were published in the front positions at each instance of time. However, the headline rumor articles did not receive the highest number of views and likes. Our findings can be beneficial for the scientific allocation of rumor regulatory resources and rumor intervention.