How to improve the rumor-confutation ability of official rumor-refuting account on social media: A Chinese case study

Abstract

Accelerated by the widespread use of social networks, the propagation of rumors has been a destructive factor in the Internet environment. Chinese governments at different administrative levels have established official rumor-refuting accounts on social media to confute rumors, but the spread of rumors in social networks remains a significant concern due to the immature construction of rumor-refuting accounts. To identify the deficiencies of official rumor-refuting accounts at different administrative levels and how to improve their rumor-confutation ability, this paper applies a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method to evaluate Chinese official rumor-refuting accounts on social media, then discusses the differences among them to provide targeted suggestions for improvement. Based on the 10,253 rumor-refuting articles published by 26 Chinese official rumor-refuting accounts on WeChat (a combined social media of Twitter and WhatsApp in China) in 2021, this paper first proposes a targeted rumor-refuting ability evaluation criteria system based on Source-Message-Channel-Receiver (SMCR) theory of communication. Then it applies the Stochastic Multi-criteria Acceptability Analysis-Analytic Hierarchy Process Sort-II with intuitionistic trapezoidal fuzzy numbers (SMAA-AHPSort-II-ITFN) method to evaluate and compare the official rumor-refuting accounts at different administrative levels. The evaluation results show significant differences in the ability of various rumor-refuting accounts to confute rumors. Finally, specific suggestions are provided for improving the ability of official rumor-refuting accounts.