Trust in State News and Online Rumours in China

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Stephanie Jean Tsang, whose focus is on media use in China. She contrasts this with news coverage in western nations, where news stories about particular incidents usually results in questions over which side (official statements or citizen stories) to believe.

In China, the media environment means that this plays out somewhat differently: rumours may circulate on its social media platforms, but official institutions including police departments are often directly engaged in the discussion, and will provide updates on these stories directly on these platforms, and seek to suppress the distribution of further online rumours.

The present paper is interested in how people come to believe in the rumours that circulate here. This is in part a question of source credibility, which also links to the perceived opinion climate on a given platform (including the risks to the user from engaging with rumours). The study builds on the Chinese General Social Survey 2015, a freely available dataset on some 12,000 participants that included a range of relevant questions.

The analysis finds that members of the Communist Party and its youth organisation are more likely to believe in government news, and to find such content consistent with their own opinion; conversely, they are less likely to believe in online rumours. Such citizens are also more likely to draw on newspapers for their news. Party membership is thus a sign of a predisposition towards the news as well as the government.