Online Public Rumor Engagement Model and Intervention Strategy in Major Public Health Emergencies: From the Perspective of Social Psychological Stress

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.

How can the collaborative participation of regulators, whistleblowers, and parties effectively promote rumor management in public health emergencies?

“…These entities may report, comment on, or propagate public health emergencies for varying motivations and objectives, leading to the distortion or Frontiers in Public Health 12 frontiersin.org misrepresentation of information. For example, a series of coupling problems such as uncontrolled rumors and public psychological imbalance will always occur on social media, which brings great interference to crisis disposal (39). And the endogenous demand for health information generated by the public due to the lack of scientific knowledge of health information stimulates the dissemination of health information by mass media, and at the same time provides rumor mongers with the opportunity to publish and disseminate online rumors (19).…”

Online rumors during the COVID-19 pandemic: co-evolution of themes and emotions

“…Drawing from a comprehensive dataset of users collected from the Weibo platform during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Liu developed an interactive infection model to explore the dynamics of multiple rumor participants within different intervention contexts, yielding varied outcomes concerning psychosocial reactions, resistance, and exhaustion periods ( 17 ). Guo et al utilized COVID-19 as a case study to investigate rumor propagation from the perspective of information access.…”

Early Cyberspace Emergency Response by Predicting Social-Emotional Security

“…Gooding and Harris [20] argued that the psychological resilience model is based on triggers and experiences that need to be tapped into people's emotional patterns from anxiety to stability. Thus, after sudden environmental stressors bring people to produce reactions [21], human psychological emotions need to be resilient and maintain stable emotions to resist the emergence of insecurity, which means monitoring the emotional volatility in stressful situations is the way to measure security.…”