JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In the context of COVID-19, various online rumors led to inappropriate behaviors in response to the epidemic among people, and adversely influenced people’s physical and mental health. A better understanding of the relationship between public emotions and rumors during the epidemic may generate some useful strategies of guiding public emotions and dispelling rumors.

Objective:

To explore whether public emotions are related to the dissemination of at times online rumors in the context of COVID-19.

Methods:

Sina Weibo is a social media platform in China. We used Scrapy to gather the data from Weibo published by People's Daily after January 8, 2020, and netizens’ comments under each Weibo post. Nearly one million comments were divided into five categories (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral) according to the emotional information in these contents by manual identification. Rumors data was collected through a platform “Tencent myth busters”. Cross-correlations analysis was used to examine the relationship between public emotions and rumors.

Results:

The results indicated that the angrier the public got, the more rumors there would be, r = 0.48, P < .001. Similar findings were found in the relationship between fear and rumors, r = 0.51, P < .001; and the relationship between sadness and rumors, r = 0.47, P < .001. Furthermore, we found that happiness lagged behind by one day with the increase of rumors, r = 0.56, P < .001. In addition, our data showed that there was a significant positive correlation between fear and fearful rumors, r = 0.34, P = .02.

Conclusions:

Our findings provide several suggestions for relevant authorities and policy makers in guiding emotions of the public during public health emergencies. First, during a large-scale quarantine period, the authorities can use web-based monitoring to detect public emotions and behaviors in real time, and make targeted guidance to channel public emotions and behaviors. Second, rumors are a catalyst for public emotions, and disproving them timely would be helpful to increase positive emotions of the public. Third, media platforms should strengthen the monitoring of online rumors, identify and verify emotional rumors in a timely manner, and minimize the spread of fearful rumors to reduce the public’s fear.