Understanding Rumor Combating Behavior on Social Media

ABSTRACT

Social media services become a hotbed for rumors and lies during health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. While previous literature studies the negative role that social media users play in spreading rumors during crises, this study explores how users can be motivated to combat COVID-19 rumors. We build a research model that is based on the Awareness-Motivation-Capability framework and empirically test our model using data collected from 279 Chinese social media users. Our results show that rumor combating behavior, defined as users’ actions to discourage others from sharing information from unverified sources, is influenced directly by the personal norm, altruism, social ties, and knowledge, and indirectly by perceived severity and perceived vulnerability through the personal norm. Our study highlights the importance of prosocial behavior such as rumor combating on social media during health crises.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 pandemic
• social media rumors
• rumor combating behavior
• Awareness-Motivation-Capability framework
• online prosocial behavior

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [71871162]; Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning [TP2018016]; Humanities and Social Science Fund of Ministry of Education of China [17YJC630237].