Information Flow Within and Across Online Media Platforms: An Agenda-setting Analysis of Rumor Diffusion on News Websites, Weibo, and WeChat in China

ABSTRACT

In China, the discussion of “fake news” often revolves around online rumor. In addition to politically motivated rumors, a large portion of profit-driven, sensational rumors permeate China's Internet. This study examines the diffusion of day-to-day online rumors on Weibo, WeChat, and mainstream news websites—the three major online news platforms in China—within an agenda-setting framework. Specifically, the study analyzed the top ten most widely distributed online rumors in China in 2016, focusing on how each rumor was reported and the transfer of rumor salience within and across the three media platforms. A total of 18,347 news items were quantitatively content analyzed and time-series analyses were conducted to discover the rumor diffusion patterns. Overall, the results show that Weibo was most likely to advance rumors, while WeChat had the greatest rumor refutation-to-advancement ratio. Mainstream news websites set the agenda of both Weibo and WeChat in refuting rumors and, ironically, also set the agenda of WeChat in advancing rumors. For rumor refuting within social media, the agenda-setting power of mainstream media remained strong on Weibo, while on WeChat governmental accounts and alternative information sources were more effective in building the mainstream media agenda.

KEYWORDS:

• Online rumor
• agenda setting
• intermedia agenda setting
• online news
• social media
• content analysis
• time series analysis

Disclosure Statement

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