Misinformation During the COVID-19 Outbreak in China: Cultural, Social and Political Entanglements

Abstract

Not only did COVID-19 give rise to a global pandemic, but also it resulted in an infodemic comprising misinformation, rumor, and propaganda. The consequences of this infodemic can erode public trust, impede the containment of the virus, and outlive the pandemic itself. The evolving and fragmented media landscape, particularly the extensive use of social media, is a crucial driver of the spread of misinformation. Focusing on the Chinese social media Weibo, we collected four million tweets, from December 9, 2019, to April 4, 2020, examining misinformation identified by the fact-checking platform Tencent-a leading Chinese tech giant. Our results show that the evolution of misinformation follows an issue-attention cycle pertaining to topics such as city lockdown, cures and preventive measures, school reopening, and foreign countries. Sensational and emotionally reassuring misinformation characterizes the whole issue-attention cycle, with misinformation on cures and prevention flooding social media. We also study the evolution of sentiment and observe that positive sentiment dominated over the course of Covid, which may be due to the unique characteristic of "positive energy" on Chinese social media. Lastly, we study the media landscape during Covid via a case study on a controversial unproven cure known as Shuanghuanglian, which testifies to the importance of scientific communication in a plague. Our findings shed light on the distinct characteristics of misinformation and its cultural, social, and political implications, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also offers insights into combating misinformation in China and across the world at large.

Emerging Infectious Outbreak Inhibits Pain Empathy Mediated Prosocial Willingness

“…Whenever a public emergency occurs, misinformation circulates throughout daily life (Leng et al, 2020).…”

Factors affecting individual online rumor sharing behavior in the COVID-19 pandemic

“… Song et al (2020) provided a large COVID-19 rumor dataset and adopted a neural topic model to label the topic classification. Other studies include the research on disinformation propagation ( Huang & Carley, 2020 ; Li et al, 2020 ); examining the social, cultural, and political entanglements ( Leng et al, 2020 ); and identifying disinformation campaigns ( Vargas et al, 2020 ). Moreover, Hui et al (2020) adopted the epidemic-like model and considered education as the control measure in analyzing the mechanism of spread.…”

Observations from Wuhan: An Adaptive Risk and Crisis Communication System for a Health Emergency

“…Leng et al's sentiment analysis of posts on Chinese social media (Weibo) found that there was a rise in fear between Jan 29, 2020 and Mar 18, 2020. 37 In addition, COVID-19 is an invisible risk, that cannot be visually seen like the physical damage caused by earthquakes, typhoons and other natural disasters, causing gaps in people’s risk perception. Consequently, the public is demanding more from governments that respond to their own appeals and delivers on its promises ( clarity , confidence ).…”