A War of (Mis)Information: The Political Eects of Rumors and Rumor Rebuttals in an Authoritarian Country

Haifeng Huang University of California, Merced hhuang24@ucmerced.edu May 30, 2013

Abstract Despite the prevalence of anti-government rumors in authoritarian countries, currently little is known about their eects on citizens attitudes toward the government, and whether the authorities can eectively combat rumors. Using an experimental design featuring rumors and rumor rebuttals from Chinese social media, I nd that rumors decrease citizens trust of the government and support of the regime; moreover, individuals of diverse socioeconomic and political backgrounds are similarly susceptible to thinly evidenced rumors, unlike the situation in democracies. Rebuttals generally reduce peoples belief in the specic content of rumors, but often do not restore political trust and support. Political attitudes can only be improved to some extent if the government brings forceful and well-evidenced arguments to support its story or win the endorsement of public gures broadly perceived to be independent. These ndings have rich implications for studies of rumors and misinformation in general, and shed new light on the politics of information in authoritarian countries.

I have beneted from the advice and comments of many people, which will be gratefully acknowledged in due time.

Introduction

Rumors as unsubstantiated information exist in every society but are particularly prevalent in authoritarian countries with restrictions on independent news media, because they usually emerge and spread amid social uncertainty and anxiety (DiFonzo and Bordia 2007), which can only be exacerbated by the lack of credible public information from free media (Kapferer 1990). Rumors can also be especially destructive to authoritarian governments. While rumors in a well established democracy typically arise from fringe sources and do not directly challenge ocial information and the mainstream media, in an authoritarian country they are an alternative form of media directly competing with ocial media, and therefore constitute a counter-power against ocial power (Kapferer 1990). The 1989 social protests that brought regime change in Czechoslovakia, for example, started with a false rumor that a university student had been brutally killed by the police (Bilefsky 2009). During the Tiananmen protests in the same year in China, rumors also played a critical role in mobilizing students and other participants of the movement (Zhao 2001). While such cases indicate that rumors can spark or intensify social protests, currently little is known about their eects on public opinion in an authoritarian country during noncrisis times, and whether the government can eectively counter the informational counterpower. Since social crises are rooted in tensions accumulated during normal times, an understanding of how battles over everyday, routine rumors accusing the government of various kinds of wrongdoings inuence mass political attitudes will shed important light on the political dynamics of authoritarian countries, particularly the issue of how citizens process competing information. Despite the prevalence of rumors, social scientic studies of the phenomenon have mostly been conned to social psychology and business research. The lack of political studies of rumors in authoritarian countries is particularly striking given their ubiquity and political signicance. Managing information ow is a fundamental feature of au-

thoritarian regimes. The previous literature on information transmission in authoritarian countries, however, focuses on the governments control and molding of public opinion and information, either through the propagation of pro-regime messages (e.g., Kenez 1985), the governments interaction with (commercialized) media and the Internet (e.g, Shirk 2010; Stockmann 2013), or downright censorship (e.g., Egorov, Guriev and Sonin 2009; Lorentzen Forthcoming). Anti-government information originating from the society has been far less studied. In particular, while government propaganda as inaccurate, exaggerated, or purely fabricated claims and myths in favor of the government has received a great deal of scholarly attention, anti-government rumors as unveried and sometimes false information, i.e., societal propaganda against the state, have largely been relegated to anecdotes rather than rigorous investigation1 . This project takes a rst step in lling this void by experimentally studying the eects of rumors and rumor rebuttals in China, the largest authoritarian country, where rumors often go viral and the authorities are hard-pressed to contain them. While existing research on rumors and misinformation focuses on individuals acceptance or rejection of their specic content, I analyze not only belief in rumors, but more importantly how rumors and rebuttals inuence citizens trust of the government in larger policy issues related to the rumors and their evaluation of the state at large. Although rumors can circulate via various means of communication, I focus on Internet rumors because the rise of the Internet and especially social media (e.g., microblogging) has dramatically increased the ease, speed, and extent of rumor propagation. As a result online rumors have been increasingly supplanting word-of-mouth rumor transmission (Fine and Ellis 2010). Despite the presence of censorship, the Internet has become the most dynamic, contentious, and even chaotic battleground for information and ideas in China (King, Pan and Roberts 2013; Tong and Lei 2013), and social-media based rumors feature prominently
The early study by Bauer and Gleicher (1953) and the more recent paper by Zhu, Lu and Shi (2013) are two rare exceptions, but they study self-reported exposure to general rumor networks rather than concrete rumors.
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in the war over information in the country. By studying a signicant form of microbloggingbased information ow, this paper is one of the rst quantitative studies of the politics of social media in China2 , and hence improves our understanding of the political challenges the Internet poses to an authoritarian government. I nd that rumors reduce peoples trust and evaluation of the government, whether in terms of specic policy issues related to the rumors or the state at large. In addition, citizens beliefs in rumors are not signicantly aected by their demographic, socioeconomic, or even political backgrounds, which is dierent from the situation in democracies. Rebuttals of rumors, on the other hand, can reduce peoples belief in the specic content of the rumors, although a considerable amount of belief in the rumors remain after the rebuttals. Unlike previous research, however, I nd that the quality and sources of rebuttals manifest their eects more signicantly on individuals political attitudes at large than on belief in the specic content of rumors. Typical rebuttals in the form of simple denials from (quasi-)ocial sources do not recover peoples trust in the government. A well-evidenced rebuttal that oers a persuasive alternative characterization, or a rebuttal from a public gure widely viewed as independent from the government, on the other hand, can sometimes recover their trust in the government. Citizens in an authoritarian country, therefore, are broadly susceptible to thinly evidenced anti-government rumors, but they can be persuaded by the government too, if the latter can bring powerful arguments to support its story or win the endorsement of public gures perceived to be independent. But to the extent that the government can only reduce but not eliminate belief in specic rumors, and can only recover some of the damaged political trust, it is hard for the government to win in this (mis)information war. Ultimately, without addressing the underlying political and socioeconomic issues, rumors will be erosive for political support in an authoritarian state.
Another major study is King, Pan and Robertss (2013) analysis of censorship patterns on Chinese blogs and BBS forums, but they did not analyze microblogging, the most inuential form of social media in China.
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Social Media and the Battle over Rumors in China

The Internet has undergone rapid growth in China, and its number of Internet users currently exceeds 560 million (CNNIC 2013), more than any other country in the world. Chinas social media landscape is particularly vibrant, with multiple Twitter-like microblogging sites, multiple Facebook-like social networking sites, and numerous Web forums and blogging sites. Sina Weibo (www.weibo.com), an extraordinarily popular microblogging platform with 500 millions registered accounts and 46.2 million active daily users, stands out as the most inuential social media site3 . The rumors and rebuttals used in this paper were taken from Sina Weibo in their original form. Like Twitter, Sina Weibo lets users post short messages (tweets) consisting of up to 140 characters, which are automatically broadcast to the posters followers, but Sina Weibo also has a few other important features: rst, Sina Weibo posts can directly include pictures and videos (not counting toward the character limit of a post) in addition to text and links; second, when forwarding (retweeting) another users post, Sina Weibo users can quote the original post in its entirety, including any picture or video it may contain, and add comments, with the original post not counting toward the 140-character limit; and lastly, Sina Weibo allows nested dialogues, i.e., besides replying or retweeting another users post, Sina Weibo users can choose to add comments and/or interact with other users directly under that post. Such features make Sina Weibo a Chinese Twitter with a Facebook look-and-feel. Together with the succinctness of the Chinese language, they also enable a Weibo post to contain considerably richer content than a Twitter post (Economist 2012) while preserving the latters brevity, two conditions ideal for the transmission of short but vivid stories such as rumors. Conversations on Sina Weibo are thus often more vibrant those are on Twit3 Sina is the company that hosts the service, and Weibo means microblogging in Chinese. The user data refer to the end of 2012. See http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2013-02/21/content_ 16243933.htm.

ter, and retweeting more prevalent (Yu, Asur and Huberman 2011). It has been widely regarded as the closest thing to a (huge) town square in China, where discussions of issues ranging from politics to entertainment are unprecedentedly freewheeling. Unsurprisingly, Sina Weibos structure and vitality have indeed made it a fertile ground for rumors, including the high-prole and unusual rumor in 2012 following the sacking of Bo Xilai, an ambitious Political Bureau member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that there was a coup staged by Bos allies (Epstein 2012). Some statistics suggest that each day there is at least one rumor widely circulating on Sina Weibo (Yang et al. 2012), and that over one third of social rumors that have appeared in the news media in 2012 are mainly circulated via Weibo (Tang 2013). Consequently Sina Weibo has been dubbed the worlds best rumor mongering machine ever by Western media (Larson 2011, 2012). The Chinese government has been greatly worried about online rumors. Besides periodic public warnings issued in state media, top ocials have personally visited the Sina Corporation to admonish them about fake and harmful information on the Weibo platform (Ji and Wang 2011). Sina Weibo and some other Chinese Web sites have also been severely reprimanded by the government for failures in the control of rumors (Xinhua News Agency 2012). It was forced to suspend the comment function for three days following the coup rumor, for instance. Sina Weibo has consequently established a points-based account management system, by which a users credit points will be reduced for behaviors deemed improper, in particular that of spreading untrue information, leading ultimately to the closure of ones account (Wines 2012). While unwelcome content on the Internet can be censored, the nature of social media means that an anti-government post may have already been read and forwarded by many Internet users, thus entering public awareness and circulation, before it can be detected and deleted4 . Furthermore, King, Pan and Roberts (2013) have shown that pure (and
Chinese social media users also commonly convert text into picture les and then post the pictures instead of the original text, which makes it harder for keywords-based censoring system to work.
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even virulent) criticism of the state without calling for collective action is often allowed on Chinese Internet; indeed, Sina Weibo has become a platform of counter-hegemony against ocial hegemony in Chinese political discourses (Tong and Lei 2013). Routine rumors are close to pure criticism in that they are intended to expose government wrongdoings rather than calling for revolt. The Chinese authorities primary method against rumors, besides the penalty scheme mentioned above, is therefore rebutting rather than (merely) removing them. Sina Weibo maintains a dedicated rumor rebuttal account, @WeiboPiyao (Weibo Rumor Rebuttals), which is staed with senior journalists twenty four hours a day and regularly issues rebuttals of rumors (Cao and An 2011). While technically speaking these rebuttals are issued by Sina rather than the government, they are often treated by Internet users as quasi-ocial, because the rms management enjoys a close relationship with the Chinese government, which is widely regarded as a reason that Sina Weibo has been allowed to grow and thrive while an earlier popular microblogging site named Fanfou was shut down following an ethnic unrest in 2009. Editors of the rebuttal account also regularly contact government agencies and ocial media organizations for verication of information. Since there is no other centralized and ocial rumor rebuttal organization in China, Sina Weibos ocial anti-rumor account has resembled a rumor control center on Chinese Internet. The rebuttals used in the rst experiment of the project were therefore taken from this account. To diversity the quality and sources of rebuttals, in the second experiment I include a detailed rebuttal from a police department and another from a well-known public gure, as will be discussed later. Since the most common type of politically-relevant Internet rumors in China are about government wrong-doings rather than political dramas such as coups, the rumors I study belong to the former category. Given the prevalence of such rumors in China, it ensures that the treatments were not unfamiliar to the subjects, and that the results indicate the real eects of rumors and rebuttals in the daily social lives of an authoritarian country. 6

Rumors, Rebuttals, and Political Trust

What we currently know about rumors comes mostly from psychological and sociological studies, therefore I follow the denition of rumor in the social psychology literature that has become more or less standard since Allport and Postmans (1947) pioneering study: a rumor is a specic proposition for belief circulating in a society despite its lack of secure standards of evidence. The emphasis here is on lack of evidence rather than falsehood, although some of the rumor examples in this paper can be shown to be false. In practical terms, a rumor in this paper refers to a claim circulating in society about a specic event or situation that is supposed to have happened or existed, without sucient evidence showing the claim to be true; in addition, the claim has been refuted by ocial sources or public gures with at least some authority on the matter, and there has been no eective argument against the refutation. This operational denition is close to Kapferer (1990)s denition of rumor as unocial information that is either not yet publicly conrmed by ocial sources or denied by them (p. 13). While the psychological, sociological, and business literatures have studied a variety of rumors, including those during wartime (Allport and Postman 1947), behind racial tensions (Fine and Turner 2001; Knopf 1975), in the marketplace (Kapferer 1990; Koller 1992), and about perceived threats across national borders (Fine and Ellis 2010), they primarily deal with the cognitive processes and social dynamics of rumor transmission, rather than its political eects, which is the focus of the current study. The recently emerging interest in political science on misinformation and fact-checking is similarly focused on factors such as political orientations and personality traits that aect belief in the specic content of false claims, as well as best methods for correcting misinformation (e.g., Nyhan and Reier 2010, 2012), rather than their eects on political attitudes. The existing research is also largely conned to democratic societies, where the existence of prevailing regime norms and independent news media means that rumors usually cannot directly compete with

mainstream or ocial information. Due to the lack of independent and trustworthy news media, rumors in an authoritarian country can enjoy a higher degree of credibility than those in a well-functioning democracy. Since politically relevant rumors in an authoritarian country are typically negative about the government, in the absence of rebuttals, the one-sided information ow from rumors will negatively aect citizens attitudes toward the government (Zaller 1992). My rst hypothesis is therefore that such rumors will reduce peoples trust and evaluation of the government (H1 ). The eects of rebuttals will be more subtle. Although rumors are about specic events or situations, the stories usually have larger political or policy implications, and hence rebuttals will have dierent levels of ramications. As the existing social psychology literature has shown, rumors typically arise in environments of social stress, conicts, and information ambiguity, and therefore reect peoples anxieties, fear, and resentment. For example, rumors about specic events that lead to racial conicts usually crystallize hostile beliefs between dierent races (Knopf 1975), and those about foreign people and countries underscore a societys anxiety over perceived global threat (Fine and Ellis 2010). As such, rumors often serve as symbolic and warning tales for the believers regardless of the veracity of specic facts alleged by the rumors (Donovan 2007; Kapferer 1990). To the extent that believers focus more on the underlying message or moral of a story rather than the specics of a rumor, the eects of rebuttals on their belief in the content of a rumor and their trust of the government in relevant policy or political issues can be divergent. Social psychology research on rebuttals focuses on their eects on individuals belief in the specic content of rumors, and the ndings are mixed. The literature has identied a variety of rebuttal practices that are eective in some contexts (see DiFonzo and Bordia 2007, chap. 9, and Nyhan and Reier 2012 for a review), but a sizable number of studies have also shown that corrections of misinformation often fail and may sometimes even backre (e.g., Mayo, Schul and Burnstein 2004; Schwarz et al. 2007). This is especially 8

true when the content of a rebuttal challenges a persons world view or cultural identity (Cook and Lewandowsky 2011; Nyhan and Reier 2010). Since routine, everyday rumors in an authoritarian country are typically about relatively mundane problems and do not by themselves constitute fundamental political issues, I expect rebuttals to decrease, though not eliminate, the recipients belief in the specic content of rumors (H2 ). Research in public opinion has shown that, with two-sided information ows, public attitudes toward an issue will depend on the relative intensity of competing political communications (Zaller 1992). Given a rumor, the relative intensity of the competing information is the strength of the rebuttal. Since rumors reect peoples anxiety and concerns on larger political and policy issues, which can be particularly evident in authoritarian countries, I expect that the divergent eects of dierent types of rebuttals to manifest most clearly in citizens trust and evaluation of the government. In other words, a weak rebuttal will fail to recover the recipients trust of the government, even though it can reduce their belief in the specic content of a rumor. The social psychology literature has shown that peoples false beliefs often persevere even when they accept the corrections due to factors such as limitation of memory (Ecker, Lewandowsky and Tang 2010; Johnson and Seifert 1994; Ross, Lepper and Hubbard 1975)5 . Such lingering eect of rumors should exhibit itself most clearly on political and policy issues underlying the rumors. The same psychological literature has also found, however, that if a correction is forceful and of high-quality, the lingering eect of initial misinformation will be limited. Therefore, a powerful rebuttal can be expected to recover some social trust of the government that had been damaged by rumors. In this paper I focus on two factors that have been identied in social psychology and political behavior literatures to be signicant in contributing to a messages power and
Similarly, studies on political campaigns have argued that refuting a claim may reinforce the term with which the original claim frames an issue (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1997), and that candidates should avoid spending much time defending their losing positions since that will prime the voters weight assigned to those issues (Simon 2002).
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persuasiveness: the quality and source of a message. The rst factor is easy to understand. In research on correcting misinformation, it has been shown that simple negations in the form of X did not do Y are not very eective, and may even backre by reinforcing the familiarity and hence acceptability of the original claim (Koller 1992; Mayo, Schul and Burnstein 2004). On the other hand, responses to false claims that are vivid, well evidenced, and provide an alternative mental model for understanding the rumored event or situation will work considerably better (Johnson and Seifert 1994; Nyhan and Reier 2011; Ross, Lepper and Hubbard 1975). Research in public opinion has also long shown that citizens often take cues from the sources of messages in forming opinions about the messages (Druckman 2003; Goren, Federico and Kittilson 2009; Kuklinski and Hurley 1994; Lupia 1994; Mondak 1993), particularly when the relevant issues are complicated and ambiguous (cf. Nicholson 2011), due to factors such as perceived credibility or likability. In particular, messages from communicators who take a position unexpected to the audience will be better received (Nicholson 2011; Okeefe 2002, chap. 8). Formal theoretic work has further demonstrated that information from a source with a known bias might be particularly valuable to a decision maker (Calvert 1985). Thus when rebutting a rumor, which by denition is about an ambiguous situation, statements from sources that are perceived to be credible, especially those from public gures that are known to dier from the target of the rumors in political positions, will be more persuasive (DiFonzo and Bordia 2007; Berinsky 2012). The above discussion leads to the following hypotheses: 1) rebuttals in the form of simple denials and from sources lacking a broad reputation of being independent from the government will not be eective in recovering peoples trust of the government (H3a ); 2) rebuttals that oer vivid evidence and forceful explanation, or from a source that is widely perceived to be independent from and even critical of the government can sometimes recover their trust of the government (H3b ).

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4.1

The Survey Experiments

Design and Recruitment
I conducted two survey experiments, respectively in the spring and summer

Design

of 2012, to test the above hypotheses. Each experiment involved two rumors and the associated rebuttals. Participants in each experiment were randomly assigned into a control group and several dierent treatment groups in a between-subjects design. All participants were asked of their information consumption habits, political interest, and general political orientations prior to any rumor and rebuttal treatment. Following the information treatments and a few distracting questions, all participants were asked to rate their trust of the government in policy issues related to the rumors and their evaluation of Chinas political system in general. Participants in the treatment groups were also asked about their belief in the specic rumors6 . For ethical reasons I used actual (and typical) Internet rumors in China in the experiments rather than making them up (which would amount to rumor-mongering on the part of the researcher), and each treatment was provided in the form of a question asking if the respondents had seen a piece of information from the Internet before. Labeling rumors as information from the Internet rather than rumors and the avoidance of providing the treatments bluntly also ensure the neutrality and naturalness of the treatments. The rebuttals in the experiments were similarly actual rebuttals from real people and organizations (with variations in quality and sources as will be discussed later), rather than made up and then attributed to some real people or organizations, which would be ethically dubious even with debrieng. Using actual rebuttals rather than constructing hypothetical ones means that it was impractical to compare rebuttals that rebuke the same rumor but dier in quality or sources. Therefore, I selected rebuttals that varied in the two dimensions, conditional on the associated rumors being typical ones, and allowed the rumors to
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Subjects in the treatment groups were debriefed after the experiments.

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be dierent from each other. This choice has its disadvantages for research but was taken for several considerations besides the obvious ethical consideration. First, the use of actual rumors and rebuttals can maximize the verisimilitude and realism of the experiments and ensure that the experimental results indicate the eects of a real rather than hypothetical information war. Second, while varying the quality and sources of rebuttals to the same rumor can perhaps reveal the importance of message quality and source more clearly, the point has already been established in the psychological and political behavior literatures. The purpose of this study is not to replicate previous research, but to take the importance of message quality and source as given, and then examine whether their eects manifest most clearly at the level of rumor belief or at the level of political attitudes. Finally, even though the rumors targeted by the rebuttals vary in their specic content, they are all typical Chinese online rumors with a similar character: they all use vivid stories to accuse the government of some kind of malfeasance, usually accompanied by some pictures. As a result, the experiment participants belief in the dierent rumors when they were not rebutted was roughly similar, as will be seen in the summary statistics of the dependent variables below. For these reasons keeping a rumor constant while constructing various hypothetical rebuttals is neither necessary nor even desired in the current research. The main potential concern regarding the use of real rumors is that some subjects may have seen some of them before. This, however, would not be a problem if the proportions of subjects in the various randomized groups that had seen a rumor were similar, which was veried by randomization checks (see below). In the regressions I also control for the respondents previous encounters with the rumors.

Recruitment

Participants of the two survey experiments were recruited from a

popular Chinese crowd-sourcing Web site for recruiting and compensating agents to perform tasks similar to Amazon.coms Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com). The surveys were 12

anonymous and the payments to participants were handled by the recruiting platform. To prevent repetitive participation, each unique IP address and each unique account at the recruiting platform was allowed to participate only once in each of the experiments7 . Since the project studies Internet rumors, recruiting subjects online and having them undertake the surveys on their own computers at their own homes or work places increased the mundane realism of the experiment and the generalizability of the results (Iyengar 2011). Subjects recruited from the Mechanical Turk have been shown to be more representative of the general public than usual convenience samples such as college students (Berinsky, Huber and Lenz 2012), and have therefore been increasingly used in political science studies including top journal publications (Grimmer, Messing and Westwood 2012; Huber, Hill and Lenz 2012). There is no reason to suspect that the best online crowdsourcing platform in China is not as good a recruitment tool for studying China as the Mechanical Turk is for studying the United States; in fact, users of the Chinese platform are almost exclusively from China while many Mechanical Turk users are actually from outside the US but with some prociency in English. The participants of my experiments came from all walks of life, various education backgrounds and age groups, and are thus far more representative of Chinas general Internet population than college students (see Table S1 in the Supplementary Materials). They also came from nearly every province of mainland China and thus had a broad geographic representation. A potential challenge to online surveys is ensuring that respondents pay proper attention to questions (Goodman, Cryder and Cheema 2012), and therefore two methods of quality control were adopted in the experiments. In the rst experiment I recorded the time each respondent spent in completing the survey and dropped from the analysis respondents who nished the survey faster than a pre-determined time threshold8 . In the second experiment I set a minimum amount of time a respondent had to spend in answer7 8

Manual checking showed that only a handful of subjects participated in both experiments. The results are qualitatively similar with dierent reasonable time thresholds.

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ing each page of the questionnaire, and was therefore able to use all participants in the analysis. These measures yielded 631 eective subjects for the rst experiment and 799 for the second experiment.

4.2
4.2.1

Experiment 1
The Experiment

The rst experiment involved rumors 1A and 1B and two associated rebuttals, and the participants were randomly assigned into one of ve approximately equal-sized groups: 1) control group; 2) rumors only; 3) rumors, with 1A rebutted; 4) rumors, with 1B rebutted; 5) rumors, with both rumors rebutted. This method of grouping is again for the sake of mundane realism: in real life Chinese Internet users will come across various rumors, and they may see none, some, or all of them rebutted. Table S2 in the Supplementary Materials shows the descriptive statistics of independent variables; balance was achieved on almost all of the covariates in the rst experiment, indicating that the randomization was quite successful. The rumor and rebuttal treatments used in the rst experiment are shown below. Because the same rumor on Sina Weibo is usually posted and reposted by many dierent users, it is often dicult to track down the original source of a rumor. Therefore each rumor was prefaced with @(name omitted) rather than any actual account name on Sina Weibo. As discussed above, the rumors or rebuttals were also all provided in the form of questions asking if the respondents have seen the relevant information from the Internet before. Rumor 1A read as follows: @(name omitted): The following are famous pictures of Li-Su children in Yunnan Province crossing the river by zip-line to go to school. Every year a dozen or so kids fall into the roaring Nu River. The county government says it is a national-level poverty-stricken county and cannot aord 400 thousand yuan to build a

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bridge, but the county party secretarys Audi sedan costs 700 thousand yuan.9 Rebuttal 1A, taken from Sina Weibos ocial rumor rebuttal account, read as follows: @WeiboPiyao: [The claim that every year a dozen or so Li-Su children fall into the Nu River while crossing the river by zip-line to go to school is a false rumor] Yesterday some Weibo users posted pictures of Li-Su kids in Yunnan crossing the river by zip-line to go to school, and alleged that every year a dozen or so children fell into the Nu River. Our investigation shows that the pictures were taken in 2007, and the photographer of those pictures, @maiquanlaile, told @WeiboPiyao today that as far as he was aware, no children ever fell into the river. Moreover, the local government had already built a bridge after initial media reports.10 Rumor 1B read as follows: @(name omitted): The compensation agreement for the Italian victim of the extraordinarily serious accident of high speed train crash in Wenzhou on July 23, 2011, has been signed, and the compensation amount is 30 million euros (about 276 million yuan). The compensation for a Chinese citizen, in contrast, is 915 thousand yuan. It is reported that the Ministry of Railway made the compensation decision after studying European laws on accidental injuries and deaths. Otherwise the European Union will sue the Chinese government and freeze its assets in Europe and the US.11 Rebuttal 1B was also from Sina Weibos rumor rebuttal account (in the form of a retweet of Sinas ocial news account): @WeiboPiyao: RT @HeadlineNews: [High speed train accident handling team: the claim about the foreign victim receiving a particularly high compensation is a false rumor] The Ministry of Railway handling team for the July 23rd high speed train accident says tonight that the online report about the Italian victim
The online rumor was accompanied with a photo collage showing several children crossing a river by zip-line. The collage, shown in the experiment, is omitted here. 10 See http://weibo.com/1866405545/xyCdn5Fyi for the original rebuttal (last accessed Oct. 6, 2012), which included a link to another page with some discussion of the rumor. Because the linked page did not provide much additional substantive information, and because Chinese Internet users typically do not click on such links when they browse microblogging posts on their mobile devices (the most frequent form of social media consumption), the link was not activated in the experiment. 11 The online rumor was typically accompanied with a photo collage showing the train crash and the headshot of a Caucasian-looking woman. The collage, shown in the experiment, is omitted here.
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receiving 30 million euros as compensation is a pure rumor. The Ministry of Railway reiterates that foreign victims of the accident will be compensated with the same standards as Chinese victims.12 These two rumors were very typical of Internet rumors in Chinathey accuse the government of some kind of malfeasance, by either omission or commission, with vivid stories and pictures. The two rebuttals were also typical ocial rebuttalsthey simply denied the rumors without giving a great deal of evidence13 , and the source of the rebuttals, Sina Weibos ocial rumor rebuttal account, was yet to establish an independent reputation due to Sina Corporations close relationship with the government. The two policy areas directly related to the rumors that the respondents were asked to evaluate were ensuring public safety (related to rumor 1A) and equal treatment of Chinese and foreign citizens (related to rumor 1B)14 . To measure their support of the state/regime at large, the respondents were also asked to evaluate Chinas current political system in general15 .

4.2.2

Analysis

There are two sets of dependent variables in the analysis: belief in the specic content of the rumors and political attitudes. Table 1 shows the group means and standard deviations of the dependent variables in the two experiments. In the following analysis, I rst compare the rumors group with the control group (the baseline) to examine the political eects of
See http://e.weibo.com/1866405545/xkotqDKGs for the original rebuttal (last accessed Oct. 6, 2012), which included a link to another page with some discussion of the rumor. Because the linked page did not provide much additional substantive information, and because Chinese Internet users typically do not click on such links when they browse microblogging posts on their mobile devices (the most frequent form of social media consumption), the link was not activated in the experiment. 13 The Web pages linked to in the rebuttals do not provide much additional information. The links were also deactivated in the experiment. 14 The exact wording was: On a scale from 1 to 7, with 1 being strongly disagree and 7 being strongly agree, indicate the extent to which you agree with the following statements: 1) in general, we can trust our governments work in improving public safety and protecting peoples lives and properties; 2) in general, we can trust that our government will provide equal treatment to Chinese citizens and foreign citizens, rather than giving foreign citizens preferential treatment. 15 On a scale from 1 to 7, indicate the extent to which you agree with the following statement: in general, Chinas political system is appropriate for us today.
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16

rumors. Then I compare the rebuttal groups with the rumor group (the baseline) to see the eects of rebuttals on 1) belief in the specic content of rumors, and 2) trust and evaluation of the government. Since the dependent variables are all attitudes on a seven-point scale, I use ordered probit regressions16 . Table 1: Summary Statistics of Dependent Variables (Measured on a Seven-Point Scale) Experiment 1 Rumor 1A Belief Control (N=125) Rumors (N=127) Rebut 1A (N=134) Rebut 1B (N=127) Rebut Both (N=118) 4.54 (1.68) 5.23 (1.41) 4.86 (1.48) 4.38 (1.58) 4.28 (1.64) 4.27 (1.47) 4.35 (1.59) Rumor 1B Belief Public Safety 4.53 (1.45) 4.20 (1.53) 4.04 (1.61) 3.44 (1.72) 3.31 (1.55) Equal Treatment 3.90 (1.82) 3.30 (1.81) Political System 5.08 (1.36) 4.73 (1.46) 4.78 (1.32) 4.94 (1.35) 4.96 (1.35)

Experiment 2 Rumor 2A Belief Control (N=177) Rumors (N=167) Rebut 2A (N=172) Rebut 2B (N=133) Rebut Both (N=150) 4.17 (1.77) 5.03 (1.70) 4.35 (1.85) 3.78 (1.57) 3.85 (1.60) 4.41 (1.55) 4.46 (1.73) Rumor 2B Belief Citizen Protection 4.41 (1.65) 4.13 (1.78) 4.50 (1.61) 2.86 (1.52) 2.52 (1.39) Ocials Family 2.42 (1.44) 2.53 (1.69) Political System 4.75 (1.37) 4.46 (1.55) 4.64 (1.56) 4.59 (1.43) 4.84 (1.38)

Entries are group means for each dependent variable, with standard deviations in parentheses.
16

I also ran OLS, which yielded the same substantive results (not reported here).

17

In all the regressions I include a set of covariates, following standard textbook advice about the power and precision of detecting/estimating treatment eects in experimental analysis (Maxwell and Delaney 2004, chap. 9). Besides the usual demographic variables, they include consumption of mainstream news, political aliation (CCP membership), prior political attitudes, and level of political interests, which can potentially condition the eects of politically-relevant messages. Prior political attitudes were measured by the respondents pro-Western orientation, which is conceptually clearer in contemporary China than the liberal-conservative ideological dimension17 . In addition, I controlled for the subjects prior encounters with the rumors (Rumor Abf and Rumor Bbf ) in regressions comparing the rebuttal groups and the rumors group. This is not possible in regressions comparing the rumors group and the control group, because subjects in the control group were not asked about rumors and so including such variables will lead to a collinearity problem. Table 2 shows the eects of rumors in the rst experiment on the respondents trust of the government in rumor-related policy areas and their evaluation of Chinas overall political system. Rumors signicantly reduced the respondents political attitudes toward the government and state in all three cases, which was consistent with H1 . Converting the ordered probit coecients into predicted probabilities (with the covariates taken at the mean values) will make the result easier to understand. Take the example of trust on public safety, for which rumors had the smallest coecient (in absolute size). The control groups probability of assigning a relatively high trust level5, 6, or 7on public safety was respectively 28.1%, 21.3%, and 6.8%, but the rumor groups probability of assigning these levels of trust decreased respectively to 25.8%, 16.1%, and 4.0%. The rumor treatment reduced the combined probability of high trust from 56.2% to 45.9%. At the same time,
Pro-Western orientation was measured as the sum of a respondents degree of agreement with the following two statements, with responses to the second statement reversely coded: 1) We must strive to learn from the West in terms of institutions, culture, and thoughts; 2) We must strive to maintain our own institutions, culture, and way of life.
17

18

it increased the probability of assigning a relatively low level of trust on public safety1, 2, or 3from 2.1%, 6.8%, and 15.8%, to respectively 3.8%, 10.0%, and 19.7%, with the combined probability rising from 24.7% to 33.5%. The magnitude of change was similar in evaluation of the political system and even larger in equal treatment trust. Table 2: Eects of Rumors on Political Attitudes: Rumor vs Control (Experiment 1) Public Safety Rumor News Poli Interest Pro-West Age Male Education Income CCP Member Cut Cut Cut Cut Cut Cut 1 2 3 4 5 6 -0.257 0.123 0.126 -0.083 -0.007 -0.166 -0.037 -0.016 0.006 -1.940 -1.255 -0.590 -0.061 0.675 1.585 Equal Treatment Political System (0.134) (0.059) (0.089) (0.047) (0.012) (0.146) (0.077) (0.107) (0.196) (0.563) (0.552) (0.549) (0.545) (0.543) (0.548) (0.132) -0.350 (0.059) (0.088) (0.046) (0.012) (0.145) (0.076) (0.106) (0.195) (0.556) (0.543) (0.540) (0.539) (0.540) (0.550) 0.0246 -0.040 0.002 -0.016 -0.154 -0.033 -0.026 0.124 -1.869 -1.351 -0.875 -0.434 0.005 0.714 (0.133) -0.266 (0.060) (0.088) (0.046) (0.012) (0.146) (0.077) (0.107) (0.195) (0.552) (0.549) (0.546) (0.544) (0.545) (0.551) 0.019 0.164 -0.157 -0.015 -0.089 0.107 -0.012 -0.080 -2.133 -1.643 -1.199** -0.562 0.231 1.224

N Pseudo R2

252 0.018

252 0.011
p < 0.10,

252 0.028
p < 0.01.

Standard errors in parentheses.

p < 0.05,

Table 2 also shows that access to mainstream news boosted the respondents trust and evaluation of the government only in one of the three cases (and with a smaller coecient than rumors), suggesting that ocially sanctioned news in an authoritarian country have lower inuence on public opinion than unocial rumors. Pro-Western orientations, unsurprisingly, tended to reduce the respondents trust of the government and evaluation of Chinas political system. These results will remain robust or become even stronger in the following regressions. 19

Table 3 shows the eects of rebuttals on the respondents belief in the content of the rumors. Rebutting a rumor indeed signicantly reduced that group of respondents belief in the rumor, whether it was 1A or 1B. Rebutting both rumors also reduced belief in the rumors, although the eect was not signicant for rumor 1B. Converting the coecients to predicted probabilities shows similar magnitudes of change as those discussed above. The results were consistent with H2 . Table 3: Belief in Rumors: Rebuttal vs Rumor (Experiment 1) Rumor 1A Rebut 1A Rebut 1B Rebut Both Rumor 1Abf Rumor 1Bbf News Poli Interest Pro-West Age Male Education Income CCP Member Cut Cut Cut Cut Cut Cut 1 2 3 4 5 6 -0.042 -0.067 0.055 -0.008 0.221 0.002 0.116 -0.029 -2.201 -1.542 -1.079 -0.483 0.089 0.935 (0.048) (0.072) (0.039) (0.011) (0.116) (0.060) (0.081) (0.168) (0.505) (0.493) (0.489) (0.487) (0.488) (0.490) -0.495 0.061 (0.135) (0.125) 0.364 -0.088 0.013 0.015 -0.002 0.123 0.0210 0.008 0.034 -1.557 -1.030 -0.499 0.025 0.754 1.595 (0.110) (0.048) (0.070) (0.039) (0.010) (0.113) (0.063) (0.084) (0.166) (0.467) (0.461) (0.459) (0.459) (0.462) (0.468) -0.307 (0.132) -0.286 -0.027 (0.131) (0.133) Rumor 1B

N Pseudo R2

379 0.016

372 0.015
p < 0.10,

Standard errors in parentheses.

p < 0.05,

p < 0.01.

Another interesting result also emerges from Table 3: personal characteristics including 20

age, education, income, and even CCP membership were not correlated with ones belief in the rumors in any signicant way. Being male increased ones belief in one of the two rumors, but as the second experiment will show, this gender eect exists only occasionally. In other words, citizens of diverse demographic, socioeconomic, and political backgrounds are similarly susceptible to anti-government rumors. This result further attests the signicance of rumors in authoritarian countries. In well-established democracies better educated and more politically sophisticated citizens are more likely to embrace mainstream norms and information, and hence less likely to believe rumors (Berinsky 2012). In addition, people are more likely to believe rumors implicating the opposite political party. In a one-party authoritarian system, however, ocial information and media are widely regarded as biased propaganda. Therefore, rumors as alternative truth will appeal to a wider segment of the population in an authoritarian country, including members of the ruling party. While Table 3 shows that rebuttals reduced the respondents belief in the rumors, Table 1 above shows that they were far from being entirely successful: on a seven-point scale, the reduction of the respondents average belief in the rumors due to rebuttals was always and often considerably less than one. A signicant degree of belief in the rumors remained after the rebuttals. But given that rebuttals reduced the respondents belief in the rumors, would they necessarily recover their trust and evaluation of the government? Table 4 shows the answer is negative. Neither rebutting a single corresponding rumor nor rebutting both rumors had any signicant eect in improving the respondents attitudes toward the government (some coecients even had the minus sign). This was consistent with hypothesis H3a , namely that simple denials from a source without a reputation of being independent from the government will not be eective in recovering peoples trust and evaluation of the government. Rebuttals eects on political attitudes and belief in specic rumors can be divergent. To sum up, in the rst experiment rumors had negative eects on the respondents atti21

Table 4: Eects of Rebuttals on Political Attitudes: Rebuttal vs Rumor (Experiment 1) Public Safety Rebut 1A Rebut 1B Rebut Both Rumor 1Abf Rumor 1Bbf News Poli Interest Pro-West Age Male Education Income CCP Member Cut Cut Cut Cut Cut Cut 1 2 3 4 5 6 0.085 0.010 0.026 -0.003 -0.001 -0.030 0.298 -0.004 -0.719 -0.132 0.479 1.035 1.811 2.536 (0.048) (0.071) (0.038) (0.011) (0.114) (0.060) (0.082) (0.167) 0.015 -0.098 (0.133) (0.125) -0.161 -0.017 -0.003 -0.029 -0.010 -0.101 -0.041 0.169 -0.019 (0.109) (0.048) (0.071) (0.039) (0.010) (0.113) (0.064) (0.085) (0.167) -0.136 (0.131) 0.057 -0.020 (0.131) (0.134) Equal Treatment Political System -0.032 0.083 0.116 0.082 -0.155 -0.024 0.144 -0.126 -0.012 -0.067 0.093 0.312 0.033 (0.131) (0.131) (0.134) (0.108) (0.094) (0.041) (0.062) (0.034) (0.009) (0.098) (0.054) (0.072) (0.146) (0.429) (0.422) (0.419) (0.419) (0.421) (0.428)

(0.489) -1.203 (0.484) -0.674 (0.484) -0.122 (0.485) 0.371 (0.489) 0.887 (0.497) 1.616

(0.467) -1.137 (0.466) -0.739 (0.465) -0.227 (0.465) 0.445 (0.466) 1.279 (0.475) 2.343

N Pseudo R2

379 0.014

372 0.008
p < 0.10,

506 0.030

Standard errors in parentheses.

p < 0.05,

p < 0.01.

tudes toward the government and state. Rebutting a rumor reduced but did not eliminate the respondents belief in the specic rumors. With regards to recovering the respondents attitudes toward the government and state, however, these simple and quasi-ocial denials consistently failed.

22

4.3
4.3.1

Experiment 2
The Experiment

The second experiment used the same procedure as the rst but a dierent set of rumors (2A and 2B) and rebuttals. Table S2 in the Supplementary Materials shows that balance was achieved on all of the covariates. The main dierences between the two experiments were the quality and sources of rebuttals, as shown below. Rumor 2A was about the Chinese governments (lack of) protection of Chinese citizens abroad18 : @(name omitted): In the American passport, there is the following sentence: No matter where you are, the United States government is always behind you. In the Chinese passport the sentence is the following: Please strictly comply with local laws and respect the customs there. Micro comment: the United States says If someone bullies you when you are abroad, just let me know and I will x that guy; China says Behave yourself when you are abroad; follow their rules and do not bring me troubles. 19 This rumor can be readily shown to be false by examining the Chinese and/or American passport, but it nevertheless received a high degree of belief among the Chinese public (in the rumor group the average level of belief was 5 out of 7, see Table 1), perhaps due to the relatively low percentage of Chinese citizens with overseas travel experience and hence possession of a passport. The rebuttal of the rumor came from a district police department of Nanjing City, which has maintained a very active presence on Sina Weibo using the handle @JiangningGonganZaixian (Jiangning Police Online). The rebuttal, accompanied by photos of relevant pages of the Chinese and American passports (see Figure 1), provided detailed information in a vivid mannerone piece of detail showed that the real situation was actually somewhat opposite to the allegation of the rumor: @JiangningGonganZaixian:
The relevant question asked the respondents to what extent they agreed with the following statement: In general, we can trust that our government will protect Chinese citizens interests abroad just as well as a developed foreign country. 19 The online rumor was typically accompanied with a photo showing the cover of a Chinese passport and the photo page of a US passport. The photo, shown in the experiment, is omitted here.
18

23

The alleged dierence between Chinese and American passports is a false rumor. The rst page of the American passport says (in English, French, and Spanish): The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection. The rst page of the Chinese passport says: The Ministry of Foreign Aairs of the Peoples Republic of China requests all civil and military authorities of foreign countries to allow the bearer of this passport to pass freely and aord assistance in case of need. Later in the American passport there is a section called Important Information, but it does not contain any sentence to the eect of No matter where you are, the United States government is always behind you. The Chinese passport does not contain the sentence Please strictly comply with local laws and respect the customs there. In fact, the sentence Avoid violating foreign laws is written in the Important Information section of the American passport.20 Rumor 2B was about a trac accident involving a luxury sports car, but it clearly alluded to the proigate lifestyles and suspicious income sources of some Chinese government ocials family members (and the related policy issue is whether the government will restrict ocials family members from improperly enriching themselves through government connections21 .): @(name omitted): At 4 AM of May 12th, a speeding red Ferrari sports car ran the red light at an intersection in Singapore, crashing into a taxi. Apart from the Ferrari owner who died on the spot, the 52-year-old Singaporean taxi driver and a Japanese passenger who were in the taxi also died after being taken to the hospital. The United Evening News of Singapore says the owner of the Ferrari sports car was a 31-yearold Chinese man from Sichuan named Ma Chi, who went to Singapore in 2008, engaged in nance and investment activities, and was in the process of applying for permanent
The original rebuttal by Jiangning Police Online was part of a collective rebuttal of ten online rumors. See http://www.weibo.com/1113218211/yfvTrr0Kq (last accessed Oct. 6, 2012). 21 The wording of the survey question was: Indicate the extent to which you agree with the following statement: In general, we can trust that our government ocials will restrict their family members not to enrich themselves through improper means or engage in other inappropriate behavior.
20

24

Figure 1: Pictures in Rebuttal 2A residency. Internet users have found from human esh searching that Ma Chis father is probably a high level ocial of the State Council.22 The rebuttal of this rumor came from Mr. Ren Zhiqiang, a real-estate developer who had become a household name in China for his frequent and outspoken criticism of government policies, which had earned him the nickname Ren Dapao (Cannon Ren). Although Ren Zhiqiang was initially known for his opinions on real estate issues, in recent years his sharp criticism has extended to many other areas including political reform, government corruption, and freedom of speech, as shown clearly in his prolic Weibo posts. As a reThe State Council is Chinas cabinet. The online rumor was typically accompanied with a photo of a car crash. The photo, shown in the experiment, is omitted here.
22

25

sult, he has been invited to drink tea with the police (a Chinese euphemism for being questioned by the police)23 . The rebuttal was as follows: @RenZhiqiang: A few days ago a Chinese man with the surname Ma was involved in a car crash in Singapore, and then many idlers from domestic and foreign media as well as the Internet started the nonsense that he was the son of Ma Kai, the General Secretary of the State Council. Ma Kai was once the deputy chief of the Xicheng District. He has no son at all; how come he suddenly has a son from Sichuan? Whenever something bad happens, some people believe it must be related to a high level Chinese ocial. What bullshit logic is this? Everyone who knows the truth should ght with this sort of nonsensical rumors and fabrications.24

4.3.2

Analysis

Table 5 shows the eects of rumors in this experiment on the respondents political attitudes. Rumors reduced the respondents trust of Chinese governments protection of citizens abroad and evaluation of the political system, similar to the rst experiment and consistent with H1 . Rumors, however, had no eect on trust of government ocials disciplining their family members. This was likely due to the fact that the trust of the Chinese public on this issue is low even without rumors. As shown in the lower half of Table 1, the control groups mean trust on this issue was only 2.4 on a seven-point scale, signicantly lower than their mean trust on all other issues in the two experiments. It simply had little room to be reduced further. Table 6 shows the eects of rebuttals on the respondents belief in the rumors. Rebutting the rumors again reduced the respondents belief in them, consistent with H2 25 . For example, rebutting rumor 2A reduced the combined predicted probability of high belief in the rumor from 66.0% to 50.2%, while increasing the combined predicted probability of
See his Weibo post http://www.weibo.com/1182389073/zdq2cDPg5 (last accessed March 22, 2013). See http://www.weibo.com/1182389073/yl6wRkFCw for the original rebuttal (last accessed Oct. 6, 2012). 25 In results not reported here, I also nd that rebutting the rumors reduced the respondents willingness to pass the rumors on to others.
24 23

26

Table 5: Eects of Rumors on Political Attitudes: Rumor vs Control (Experiment 2) Citizen Protection Rumor News Political Interest Pro-West Age Male Education Income CCP Member Cut Cut Cut Cut Cut Cut 1 2 3 4 5 6 -0.187 0.007 0.054 -0.113 -0.007 0.080 0.030 0.148 0.402 -1.230 -0.745 -0.186 0.234 0.879 1.626 (0.112) (0.049) (0.077) (0.042) (0.012) (0.119) (0.067) (0.084) (0.166) (0.486) (0.482) (0.481) (0.481) (0.481) (0.486) Ocials Family 0.006 0.078 -0.063 -0.071 -0.035 0.032 0.075 0.184 0.137 -0.400 0.164 0.670 1.155 1.544 2.075 (0.117) (0.052) (0.082) (0.045) (0.014) (0.125) (0.069) (0.090) (0.170) (0.504) (0.504) (0.505) (0.508) (0.512) (0.529) Political System -0.228 0.051 0.012 -0.187 -0.030 0.162 0.017 0.218 0.509 -2.067 -1.784 -1.177 -0.617 0.294 1.374 (0.113) (0.049) (0.078) (0.043) (0.013) (0.120) (0.067) (0.085) (0.168) (0.495) (0.491) (0.486) (0.485) (0.485) (0.490)

N Pseudo R2

344 0.017

344 0.017

344 0.041

Standard errors in parentheses.

p < 0.10,

p < 0.05,

p < 0.01.

low belief from 15.7% to 27.4%. Table 6 also shows that personal characteristics had no signicant or consistent eects on the respondents belief in the rumors. CCP membership reduced the respondents belief in one of the rumors, but education actually increased belief in it, contrary to the results from democracies. In addition, as Table 1 shows, in this experiment a considerable degree of belief in the content of the rumors still remained after the rebuttals. The last set of results in the second experiment were about the eects of rebuttals on political attitudes, and here the two experiments exhibited notable dierences. Table 7 shows that the detailed and vivid rebuttal of the passport rumor (2A) signicantly increased the respondents trust of the Chinese government in citizen protection. The rebuttal of the Ferrari rumor (2B) from the well known government critic Ren Zhiqiang also signicantly 27

Table 6: Belief in Rumors: Rebuttal vs Rumor (Experiment 2) 2A Belief Rebut 2A Rebut 2B Rebut Both Rumor 2Abf Rumor 2Bbf News Poli Interest Pro-West Age Male Education Income CCP Membership Cut Cut Cut Cut Cut Cut 1 2 3 4 5 6 0.028 0.070 0.066 0.014 -0.084 0.021 -0.113 -0.060 -1.020 -0.685 -0.365 0.230 0.775 1.392 (0.042) (0.062) (0.035) (0.010) (0.099) (0.055) (0.071) (0.137) (0.412) (0.410) (0.409) (0.409) (0.409) (0.412) -0.511 0.180 -0.407 (0.114) -0.422 (0.118) -0.357 (0.095) 0.274 0.007 0.026 0.054 -0.016 -0.043 0.104 -0.016 -0.315 -1.417 -0.865 -0.248 0.350 0.898 1.497 (0.101) (0.044) (0.067) (0.037) (0.010) (0.100) (0.056) (0.071) (0.140) (0.414) (0.412) (0.410) (0.409) (0.409) (0.414) (0.121) (0.117) 2B Belief

N Pseudo R2
Standard errors in parentheses.

489 0.020

450 0.021

p < 0.10,

p < 0.05,

p < 0.01.

increased their trust on government ocials disciplining their family members. In addition, rebutting both rumors signicantly increased their evaluation of Chinas political system. The coecients of rebuttals in other cases, however, are not signicant. Rebutting either rumor 2A or rumor 2B, for example, had no signicant eect in improving the respondents evaluation of Chinas political system. In terms of predicted probabilities, rebutting rumor 2A increased the probability of high trust on citizen protection (relative to the rumor condition) from 44.5% to 53.8%, while reducing the probability of low trust from 33.9%

28

to 25.8%. Rebutting rumor 2B increased the probability of high trust regarding ocials family members from 10.11% to 15.7%, while reducing the probability of low trust from 75.1% to 65.9%. Rebutting both rumors increased the probability of high evaluation of the political system from 55.22% to 64.4%, while reducing the probability of low evaluation from 20.3% to 14.3%. All in all the results were consistent with H3b . Table 7: Eects of Rebuttals on Political Attitudes: Rebuttal vs Rumor (Experiment 2) Citizen Protection Rebut 2A Rebut 2B Rebut Both Rumor 2Abf Rumor 2Bbf News Political Interest Pro-West Age Male Education Income CCP Member Cut Cut Cut Cut Cut Cut 1 2 3 4 5 6 -0.030 0.099 -0.081 -0.002 -0.005 -0.029 0.224 0.257 -1.055 -0.550 -0.035 0.519 1.120 1.887 (0.042) (0.062) (0.035) (0.010) (0.097) (0.055) (0.070) (0.137) (0.408) (0.405) (0.404) (0.405) (0.406) (0.409) 0.145 -0.082 (0.116) (0.094) -0.288 0.104 -0.033 -0.071 -0.024 0.007 0.031 0.293 0.351 0.016 0.591 1.076 1.675 2.290 2.671 (0.105) (0.046) (0.070) (0.039) (0.010) (0.104) (0.058) (0.076) (0.143) 0.234 (0.112) 0.267 0.027 (0.125) (0.121) Ocials Family Political System 0.139 0.0552 0.238 -0.184 -0.226 0.012 0.062 -0.109 -0.018 0.023 -0.004 0.276 0.295 (0.113) (0.121) (0.117) (0.085) (0.086) (0.037) (0.055) (0.032) (0.009) (0.086) (0.048) (0.062) (0.123) (0.364) (0.360) (0.357) (0.357) (0.358) (0.362)

(0.426) -1.579 (0.427) -1.173 (0.428) -0.757 (0.430) -0.059 (0.435) 0.741** (0.447) 1.673

N Pseudo R2

489 0.016

450 0.031

622 0.028

Standard errors in parentheses.

p < 0.10,

p < 0.05,

p < 0.01.

In sum, rebuttals in the second experiment yielded more positive results in improving the subjects trust and evaluation of the government than those in the rst experiment, 29

because they either contained detailed and vivid evidence or came from a source widely perceived to be independent from the government. The success, however, was only partial, since a considerable degree of belief in the specic rumors remained after the rebuttals, and rebuttals did not improve political trust and evaluation in all cases.

Discussion and Conclusion

Rumors in authoritarian countries, as societal propaganda against the state (in eect if not in purpose), are highly prevalent, visible, and politically signicant, and yet there has been a dearth of quantitative studies about the political eects of rumors in such countries and whether rumors can be eectively countered, perhaps due to the diculty of rigorously studying something that is usually informal, mercurial, and transmitted through whispers. The rise of the Internet and especially social media, where rumors are openly posted and reposted in roughly similar written forms, oers an opportunity to carefully study this important phenomenon. This paper provides such a study using experiments, where causal eects of the treatments can be isolated, with representative rumors and rebuttals from the Chinese Internet. The results of this project contribute to both the study of misinformation and rumor in general and that of information politics in authoritarian countries. While the current results corroborate with some aspects of the previous research in social psychology on rumors, namely that the quality and sources of rebuttals matter a great deal in the effectiveness of rebuttals, they also reveal a crucial aspect of rumor rebuttals that has been largely neglected. Previous scholarship has focused on how dierent types of rebuttals aect peoples belief in the specic content of rumors, not how they aect peoples political attitudes. The current results show that the divergent eects of dierent types of rebuttals operate more on the political and policy dimension than on the specic content of rumors: belief in rumors themselves is generally (though not completely) responsive to

30

correction, but the eects of rebuttals on alleviating citizens anxiety and concerns about larger political and policy issues underlying the rumors are far less consistent. This suggests that researchers on rumors and misinformation should pay more attention to social and political factors that give rise to misinformation and rumors in the rst place, rather than treating them as isolated phenomena. It should particularly be the case in the authoritarian context, where rumors are especially prevalent, and citizens of diverse demographic, socioeconomic, and even political backgrounds believe in rumors similarly, precisely because the concerns and anxiety over political and policy issues are widespread. In terms of our understanding of authoritarian politics, the study shows a nuanced picture of the information politics in authoritarian countries: on one hand citizens of diverse backgrounds are similarly susceptible to anti-regime messages including false information, which reduces their trust and evaluation of the government, and on the other hand the government can counter the inuence of such messages to some extent, if the counter messages are forceful and evidenced, or issued by sources broadly perceived to be independent from the government. Even in such cases, however, the government can only reduce but in no way eliminate citizens belief in rumors, and it can only recover political trust in some cases. As a defender in this war of (mis)information, the government can at most contain but not eradicate the negative eects of rumors. As noted earlier, the use of actual rebuttals issued by real people and real organizations in the experiments has made it impractical to vary the quality and/or sources of rebuttals while keeping the rumors constant. Some of the reasons for this choice have already been discussed. Here I just note that the various rebuttals in the experiments did all reduce the subjects belief in the rumors; in other words, they worked. But the eectiveness at the rumor level does not necessarily mean eectiveness at a higher political level. Only strong and well-evidenced rebuttals and those from a source broadly perceived to be independent can be eective at both the political level and the rumor level, which is a key nding of this paper. 31

One may wonder if the eects of the treatments revealed in the experiments are of a short term nature and may not really matter in reality. It is important to note that typical Chinese Internet users are inundated with rumors in their routine online activities. Even though the eect of a particular rumor (or rebuttal) on citizens political attitudes might be temporary, the accumulated eects of experiencing such messages on a regular basis will be long lasting. The eects of rumors and rebuttals revealed in this paper are therefore not conned to the experimental setting. This study has focused on routine rumors emerged out of society about various government wrongdoings, and future work can continue to investigate the eects of such rumors and their rebuttals, since the current paper is only a rst step in this line of research. Future studies, however, can also extend into other types of rumors, such as those about coups or political inghting, or rumors deliberately planted by the states opponents. Such rumors are also important elements of the informational dynamics in an authoritarian country. Studying all these types of rumors will yield a more complete picture of the politics of information in such countries.

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Appendix:

Supplementary Materials

Note: The following materials are for review purposes and will be put in an online appendix upon publication. Table S1: Demographics of the Experiment Participants and Chinese Internet Users Experiment Experiment Chinese Demographics 1 2 Internet Users Gender: Female 43.90% 45.68% 44.1% Location: Rural 28.37% 17.02% 26.5% Student 43.26% 33.17% 30.2% Manufacturing worker 3.49% 2.25% 3.5% Service worker 2.69% 3.0% 3.5% Migrant worker 0.79% 1.13% 3.0% Self-employed 9.19% 10.26% 16.0% Professional 12.04% 14.4% 8.3% Corporate oce worker 16.96% 20.78% 9.9% Occupation Corporate management 3.33% 4.51% 4.0% Government worker 2.06% 2.25% 5.2% Government ocial 0.16% 0% 0.7% Farmer 0% 0% 4.0% Unemployed 4.91% 5.88% 8.6% Retired 0% 0.13% 1.8% Other 1.1% 2.0% 1.3% Primary school 0.16% 0.21% 8.5% Junior high 3.65% 2.93% 35.7% Education Senior high 11.09% 18.29% 33.3% 2-year college 34.23% 32.60% 10.5% 4-year college 50.87% 45.98% 11.9% < 10 0% 0% 1.7% 10-19 7.13% 6.58% 26.7% 20-29 78.13% 78.9% 29.8% Age 30-39 12.05% 12.74% 25.7% 40-49 2.53% 1.78% 11.4% 50-59 0.16% 0% 4.1% 60 0% 0% 0.7%
* The 29th Statistical Report of Internet Development in China (January 2012).

Table S2: Balance and Descriptive Statistics of Independent Variables News Poli ProAge Male Edu Income CCP Interest West Member Experiment 1 Control (N=125) Rumors (N=127) Rebut 1A (N=134) Rebut 1B (N=127) Rebut Both (N=118) F P rob > F 3.93 (1.31) 3.98 (1.26) 3.79 (1.26) 3.87 (1.32) 3.91 (1.25) 0.39 0.817 2.71 (.81) 2.74 (.83) 2.61 (.79) 2.71 (.81) 2.66 (.87) 0.49 0.741 3.07 (1.45) 2.95 (1.44) 3.05 (1.35) 2.69 (1.33) 2.89 (1.42) 1.59 0.175 25.07 (4.90) 25.91 (6.39) 23.51 (3.95) 25.11 (5.02) 24.31 (5.11) 4.04 0.003 .59 (.49) .60 (.49) .49 (.50) .54 (.50) .59 (.49) 1.25 0.288 4.46 (.88) 4.28 (.94) 4.35 (.87) 4.46 (.82) 4.31 (.95) 1.08 0.365 2.86 (.65) 2.69 (.62) 2.78 (.70) 2.78 (.62) 2.78 (.68) 1.07 0.369 .15 (.36) .15 (.36) .12 (.33) .13 (.34) .12 (.32) 0.27 0.896

Rumor Abf

Rumor Bbf

.80 (.40) .70 (.46) .72 (.45) .74 (.44) 1.34 0.260

.55 (.50) .47 (.50) .54 (.50) .49 (.50) 0.73 0.535

Experiment 2 Control (N=177) Rumors (N=167) Rebut 2A (N=172) Rebut 2B (N=133) Rebut Both (N=150) F P rob > F 4.21 (1.20) 4.08 (1.27) 4.12 (1.19) 4.02 (1.37) 4.07 (1.22) 0.52 0.724 2.84 (.85) 2.83 (.79) 2.82 (.92) 2.78 (.87) 2.83 (.83) 0.09 0.985 2.95 (1.31) 2.84 (1.38) 3.05 (1.36) 2.83 (1.27) 2.83 (1.29) 0.83 0.507 24.50 (4.23) 24.79 (4.98) 24.67 (4.19) 25.17 (5.70) 24.60 (5.03) 0.401 0.808 .51 (.50) .59 (.49) .58 (.50) .51 (.50) .53 (.50) 0.89 0.467 4.21 (.89) 4.27 (.87) 4.31 (.91) 4.29 (.93) 4.15 (.96) 0.77 0.543 2.77 (.63) 2.77 (.74) 2.80 ( .65) 2.80 (.69) 2.77 (.69) 0.12 0.975 .12 (.33) .16 (.37) .12 (.33) .11 (.32) .19 (.40) 1.43 0.224

.51 (.50) .46 (.50) .40 (.49) .49 (.50) 1.38 0.247

.50 (.50) .42 (.50) .44 (.50) .47 (.50) 0.70 0.553

Entries are group means for each covariate, with standard deviations in parentheses. Bartletts test for equal variances is satised for all covariates except age. The F* test was used for age in lieu of the standard F test.