Is citizen journalism better than professional journalism for fact-checking rumours in China? How Weibo users verified information following the 2015 Tianjin blasts

Abstract

This article investigates how citizens contribute to rumour verification on social media in China, drawing on a case study of Weibo communication about the 2015 Tianjin blasts. Three aspects of citizen engagement in verifying rumours via Weibo are examined: (1) how they directly debunked rumours related to the blasts, (2) how they verified official rumour messages and (3) how they used Weibo's community verification function to collectively identify and fact-check rumours. The article argues that in carrying out such activities, ordinary Weibo users were engaging in practices of citizen journalism. Findings from our analysis suggest that even though citizen journalists' direct engagement in publishing debunking messages was not as visible as that of the police and mainstream media, self-organised grassroots rumour-debunking practices demonstrate great potential. In terms of both the reposts and the positive comments they received, rumour-debunking posts from non-official actors appear to have been given more credibility than those from their official counterparts. In contrast, the official narratives about the Tianjin blasts were challenged, and the credibility of the official rumour-debunking messages was commonly questioned. Nevertheless, this article also shows that Weibo's community verification system had limited effects in facilitating how Weibo users could collaboratively fact-check potentially false information.

Exploring the effect of Weibo opinion leaders on the dynamics of public opinion in China: A revisit of the two-step flow of communication

“…Scholars pointed out that social issues or security incidents are on the fringe of censorship, as they do not constitute a direct threat to the legitimacy of the ruling party and to the overall social stability (e.g., Su, 2019; Su & Borah, 2019). Moreover, for the purpose herein, the Tianjin Explosion was not treated as the alleged sensitive words at the time (e.g., Zeng, Burgess, & Bruns, 2019; Zeng, Chan, & Fu, 2017). Therefore, the concern of the sampling bias caused by censorship is minimal.…”

Echo Chamber Effect in Rumor Rebuttal Discussions About COVID-19 in China: Social Media Content and Network Analysis Study

“…Due to geographical social distancing, rumor resolution mainly relied on online rebuttal. Therefore, this study first used Sina Weibo’s application programming interface [ 10 ] to crawl the original tweets containing the keywords “novel coronavirus (新冠)/COVID-19” and “rumor rebuttal (辟谣)” from 10 AM on January 23, 2020, to midnight on April 8, 2020; the posters’ information was also included. Next, we examined the list of retweets and comments of each original tweet to obtain the retweets and comments as well as the corresponding user information.…”

“…By the same rule, they categorized the retweeting and commenting users, and intercoder reliability was calculated (retweeting users: κ=0.889; commenting users: κ=0.961). The high number of users who retweeted or commented on and agreed with the rumor rebuttal post served as a sign of effective refutation [ 10 , 64 ].…”

“…Retweeting and commenting serve as evidence of the effectiveness of information dissemination strategies [ 10 , 42 ] or evidence of the significance of the content that was retweeted or commented on [ 43 ]. What’s more, retweets and comments can reflect public attitudes [ 15 , 40 , 41 ].…”

“…While social media serves as a breeding ground for rumors, it is also directly used for rumor management [8][9][10]. However, the lack of fact verification of rumor rebuttal released by the public, as well as the national media or government organizations fabricating incorrect stories to conceal facts, lead to more intense controversy about rumor rebuttal, greatly dispelling the effectiveness of rumor rebuttal during public events [11].…”