Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jan 7, 2021
Date Accepted: Mar 4, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Mar 10, 2021
Echo Chamber Effect in the Discussions of Rumor Rebuttal about COVID-19 in China: Existence and Impact
ABSTRACT
Background:
The dissemination of rumor rebuttal on social media is vital for rumor control and disease containment during public health crisis. Previous researches on the effectiveness of rumor rebuttal, to a certain extent, ignored or simplified the network structure of dissemination and users’ cognition, decision-making and interaction behavior.
Objective:
This research aimed to deeply dig into the attitude-based echo chamber effect in the response of the public towards rumor rebuttal under multiple topics on Weibo, a Chinese social media, in the early stage of COVID-19 epidemic, and its impact on information characteristics of user interaction content.
Methods:
We called the Sina Weibo API to crawl rumor rebuttal related to COVID-19 from 10 a.m. on 23rd January 2020 to 0 a.m. on 8th April 2020. Using content analysis, sentiment analysis, social network analysis and statistical analysis, we firstly analyzed whether there was echo chamber effect in individual's attitude choice when retweeting or commenting on others. Then, we tested the heterogeneity of attitude distribution within communities and the homophily of interactions between communities. Based on the results of user- and community-levels, we made a comprehensive judgment. Finally, we examined the content of user interaction from three dimensions of sentimental expression, information seeking and sharing, and civilization to test the influence of echo chamber effect.
Results:
Our results indicated that the retweeting mechanism played an important role in promoting polarization and the commenting mechanism in consensus building, denied that there might be significant echo chamber effect in community interaction, and proved that compared to like-minded interactions, cross-cutting interactions significantly contained more negative sentiment, information seeking and sharing, incivility. In addition, we found that online users’ information seeking was accompanied by incivility, and information sharing was accompanied by more negative sentiment, which was often accompanied by incivility.
Conclusions:
Our findings revealed the existence degree of echo chamber effect from multiple dimensions (such as topic, interaction mechanism, interaction level) and its impact on interaction content. These findings can provide several suggestions to prevent or alleviate group polarization to achieve better rumor rebuttal.
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