Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 29, 2020
Date Accepted: Oct 26, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Oct 28, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The Relationship between Public Emotions and Rumors in the Context of COVID-19
ABSTRACT
Background:
In the present study, we aim to explore whether public emotions are related to the dissemination of emotional online comments and at times online rumors in the context of COVID-19.
Objective:
To explore whether public emotions are related to the dissemination of emotional online comments and at times online rumors in the context of COVID-19.
Methods:
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. Similar findings were found in the relationship between fear and rumors and the relationship between sadness and rumors. Furthermore, we found that happiness would lag behind by one day with the increase of rumors. In addition, our data showed that there was a significant positive correlation between fear and fearful rumors.
Conclusions:
Our findings provide supportive evidence to the relationship between Public Emotions and Rumors in the Context of COVID-19.
Citation
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Copyright
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