A War of (Mis)Information: The Political Effects ofRumors and Rumor Rebuttals in an Authoritarian

Country

Haifeng Huang∗

University of California, Mercedhhuang24@ucmerced.edu

May 30, 2013

Abstract

Despite the prevalence of anti-government rumors in authoritarian countries, cur-

rently little is known about their effects on citizens’ attitudes toward the government,

and whether the authorities can effectively combat rumors. Using an experimental

design featuring rumors and rumor rebuttals from Chinese social media, I find that

rumors decrease citizens’ trust of the government and support of the regime; more-

over, individuals of diverse socioeconomic and political backgrounds are similarly

susceptible to thinly evidenced rumors, unlike the situation in democracies. Rebut-

tals generally reduce people’s belief in the specific 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 figures broadly perceived to be independent.

These findings 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 benefited from the advice and comments of many people, which will be gratefully acknowledgedin due time.

1 Introduction

Rumors as unsubstantiated information exist in every society but are particularly preva-

lent 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 official information and the mainstream media, in an authoritarian

country they are an alternative form of media directly competing with official media, and

therefore constitute a counter-power against official power (Kapferer 1990). The 1989 so-

cial 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 effects on public opinion in an authoritarian country during non-

crisis times, and whether the government can effectively counter the informational counter-

power. 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 influence 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 scientific studies of the phenomenon have

mostly been confined to social psychology and business research. The lack of political

studies of rumors in authoritarian countries is particularly striking given their ubiquity

and political significance. Managing information flow is a fundamental feature of au-

1

thoritarian regimes. The previous literature on information transmission in authoritarian

countries, however, focuses on the government’s control and molding of public opinion and

information, either through the propagation of pro-regime messages (e.g., Kenez 1985), the

government’s 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 schol-

arly attention, anti-government rumors as unverified 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 first step in filling this void by experimentally studying the effects

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 spe-

cific content, I analyze not only belief in rumors, but more importantly how rumors and

rebuttals influence 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

1The 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 thanconcrete rumors.

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in the war over information in the country. By studying a significant form of microblogging-

based information flow, this paper is one of the first 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 find that rumors reduce people’s trust and evaluation of the government, whether

in terms of specific policy issues related to the rumors or the state at large. In addition,

citizens’ beliefs in rumors are not significantly affected by their demographic, socioeco-

nomic, or even political backgrounds, which is different from the situation in democracies.

Rebuttals of rumors, on the other hand, can reduce people’s belief in the specific content

of the rumors, although a considerable amount of belief in the rumors remain after the

rebuttals. Unlike previous research, however, I find that the quality and sources of re-

buttals manifest their effects more significantly on individuals’ political attitudes at large

than on belief in the specific content of rumors. Typical rebuttals in the form of simple

denials from (quasi-)official sources do not recover people’s trust in the government. A

well-evidenced rebuttal that offers a persuasive alternative characterization, or a rebuttal

from a public figure 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 ev-

idenced 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 figures perceived to be independent. But to the extent that the government can

only reduce but not eliminate belief in specific 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.

2Another major study is King, Pan and Roberts’s (2013) analysis of censorship patterns on Chineseblogs and BBS forums, but they did not analyze microblogging, the most influential form of social mediain China.

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2 Social Media and the Battle over Rumors in China

The Internet has undergone rapid growth in China, and its number of Internet users cur-

rently exceeds 560 million (CNNIC 2013), more than any other country in the world.

China’s social media landscape is particularly vibrant, with multiple Twitter-like mi-

croblogging sites, multiple Facebook-like social networking sites, and numerous Web forums

and blogging sites. Sina Weibo (www.weibo.com), an extraordinarily popular microblog-

ging platform with 500 millions registered accounts and 46.2 million active daily users,

stands out as the most influential 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 poster’s followers, but Sina Weibo also

has a few other important features: first, 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 user’s 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 user’s 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. To-

gether 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 latter’s 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 Twit-

3“Sina” is the company that hosts the service, and “Weibo” means microblogging in Chinese. The userdata refer to the end of 2012. See http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2013-02/21/content_

16243933.htm.

4

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 Weibo’s structure and vitality have indeed made it a fertile ground for rumors, in-

cluding the high-profile 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 Bo’s 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 world’s

best rumor mongering machine ever” by Western media (Larson 2011, 2012).

The Chinese government has been greatly worried about online rumors. Besides peri-

odic public warnings issued in state media, top officials have personally visited the Sina

Corporation to admonish them about “fake and harmful information” on the Weibo plat-

form (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 follow-

ing the coup rumor, for instance. Sina Weibo has consequently established a points-based

account management system, by which a user’s credit points will be reduced for behaviors

deemed improper, in particular that of “spreading untrue information”, leading ultimately

to the closure of one’s 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

4Chinese social media users also commonly convert text into picture files and then post the picturesinstead 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 official hegemony in Chinese political discourses (Tong and Lei 2013). Routine

rumors are close to pure criticism in that they are intended to expose government wrong-

doings 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 Ru-

mor Rebuttals), which is staffed with senior journalists twenty four hours a day and reg-

ularly 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 In-

ternet users as quasi-official, because the firm’s 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 official media organizations for verification of

information. Since there is no other centralized and official rumor rebuttal organization in

China, Sina Weibo’s official anti-rumor account has resembled a rumor control center on

Chinese Internet. The rebuttals used in the first 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 figure, 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 effects of rumors and rebuttals in the daily social lives of an authoritarian country.

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3 Rumors, Rebuttals, and Political Trust

What we currently know about rumors comes mostly from psychological and sociological

studies, therefore I follow the definition of rumor in the social psychology literature that

has become more or less standard since Allport and Postman’s (1947) pioneering study: a

rumor is a specific 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 specific event

or situation that is supposed to have happened or existed, without sufficient evidence

showing the claim to be true; in addition, the claim has been refuted by official sources or

public figures with at least some authority on the matter, and there has been no effective

argument against the refutation. This operational definition is close to Kapferer (1990)’s

definition of rumor as unofficial information “that is either not yet publicly confirmed by

official 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 effects, 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 affect belief in the specific content of

false claims, as well as best methods for correcting misinformation (e.g., Nyhan and Reifler

2010, 2012), rather than their effects on political attitudes. The existing research is also

largely confined to democratic societies, where the existence of prevailing regime norms

and independent news media means that rumors usually cannot directly compete with

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mainstream or official 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 flow from rumors

will negatively affect citizens’ attitudes toward the government (Zaller 1992). My first

hypothesis is therefore that such rumors will reduce people’s trust and evaluation of the

government (H1).

The effects of rebuttals will be more subtle. Although rumors are about specific events

or situations, the stories usually have larger political or policy implications, and hence

rebuttals will have different levels of ramifications. As the existing social psychology lit-

erature has shown, rumors typically arise in environments of social stress, conflicts, and

information ambiguity, and therefore reflect people’s anxieties, fear, and resentment. For

example, rumors about specific events that lead to racial conflicts usually crystallize hostile

beliefs between different races (Knopf 1975), and those about foreign people and countries

underscore a society’s 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 specific “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

specifics of a rumor, the effects 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 effects on individuals’ belief in

the specific content of rumors, and the findings are mixed. The literature has identified a

variety of rebuttal practices that are effective in some contexts (see DiFonzo and Bordia

2007, chap. 9, and Nyhan and Reifler 2012 for a review), but a sizable number of studies

have also shown that corrections of misinformation often fail and may sometimes even

backfire (e.g., Mayo, Schul and Burnstein 2004; Schwarz et al. 2007). This is especially

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true when the content of a rebuttal challenges a person’s world view or cultural identity

(Cook and Lewandowsky 2011; Nyhan and Reifler 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 specific content of rumors (H2).

Research in public opinion has shown that, with two-sided information flows, public at-

titudes toward an issue will depend on the relative intensity of competing political commu-

nications (Zaller 1992). Given a rumor, the relative intensity of the competing information

is the strength of the rebuttal. Since rumors reflect people’s anxiety and concerns on larger

political and policy issues, which can be particularly evident in authoritarian countries, I

expect that the divergent effects of different 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 specific content of a rumor. The social psychology literature has shown that peo-

ple’s 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 effect 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 effect 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 identified in social psychology and

political behavior literatures to be significant in contributing to a message’s power and

5Similarly, studies on political campaigns have argued that refuting a claim may reinforce the term withwhich the original claim frames an issue (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1997), and that candidates should avoidspending much time defending their losing positions since that will prime the voters’ weight assigned tothose issues (Simon 2002).

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persuasiveness: the quality and source of a message. The first 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 effective, and may even backfire 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 Reifler

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), par-

ticularly when the relevant issues are complicated and ambiguous (cf. Nicholson 2011), due

to factors such as perceived credibility or likability. In particular, messages from commu-

nicators who take a position unexpected to the audience will be better received (Nicholson

2011; O’keefe 2002, chap. 8). Formal theoretic work has further demonstrated that infor-

mation from a source with a known bias might be particularly valuable to a decision maker

(Calvert 1985). Thus when rebutting a rumor, which by definition is about an ambiguous

situation, statements from sources that are perceived to be credible, especially those from

public figures that are known to differ 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 effective in recovering people’s trust of the government (H3a);

2) rebuttals that offer 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 The Survey Experiments

4.1 Design and Recruitment

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

of 2012, to test the above hypotheses. Each experiment involved two rumors and the as-

sociated rebuttals. Participants in each experiment were randomly assigned into a control

group and several different 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 treat-

ments 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 China’s political

system in general. Participants in the treatment groups were also asked about their belief

in the specific rumors6.

For ethical reasons I used actual (and typical) Internet rumors in China in the experi-

ments 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 organiza-

tions (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 du-

bious even with debriefing. Using actual rebuttals rather than constructing hypothetical

ones means that it was impractical to compare rebuttals that rebuke the same rumor but

differ in quality or sources. Therefore, I selected rebuttals that varied in the two dimen-

sions, conditional on the associated rumors being typical ones, and allowed the rumors to

6Subjects in the treatment groups were debriefed after the experiments.

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be different 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 ex-

perimental results indicate the effects 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 effects 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 specific 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 experi-

ment participants’ belief in the different 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 verified 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 per-

form tasks similar to Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com). The surveys were

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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 repre-

sentative 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 crowd-

sourcing 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 proficiency 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 China’s 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 atten-

tion to questions (Goodman, Cryder and Cheema 2012), and therefore two methods of

quality control were adopted in the experiments. In the first experiment I recorded the

time each respondent spent in completing the survey and dropped from the analysis re-

spondents who finished 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 answer-

7Manual checking showed that only a handful of subjects participated in both experiments.8The results are qualitatively similar with different 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 effective subjects for the first experiment and 799

for the second experiment.

4.2 Experiment 1

4.2.1 The Experiment

The first experiment involved rumors 1A and 1B and two associated rebuttals, and the

participants were randomly assigned into one of five 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 first experiment, indicating that the randomization was quite

successful.

The rumor and rebuttal treatments used in the first experiment are shown below.

Because the same rumor on Sina Weibo is usually posted and reposted by many different

users, it is often difficult 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 afford 400 thousand yuan to build a

14

bridge, but the county party secretary’s Audi sedan costs 700 thousand yuan.9

Rebuttal 1A, taken from Sina Weibo’s official 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 Weibo’s rumor rebuttal account (in the form of a

retweet of Sina’s official 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

9The online rumor was accompanied with a photo collage showing several children crossing a river byzip-line. The collage, shown in the experiment, is omitted here.

10See 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 didnot provide much additional substantive information, and because Chinese Internet users typically do notclick on such links when they browse microblogging posts on their mobile devices (the most frequent formof social media consumption), the link was not activated in the experiment.

11The online rumor was typically accompanied with a photo collage showing the train crash and theheadshot of a Caucasian-looking woman. The collage, shown in the experiment, is omitted here.

15

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 China—they accuse the gov-

ernment of some kind of malfeasance, by either omission or commission, with vivid stories

and pictures. The two rebuttals were also typical official rebuttals—they simply denied

the rumors without giving a great deal of evidence13, and the source of the rebuttals, Sina

Weibo’s official rumor rebuttal account, was yet to establish an independent reputation due

to Sina Corporation’s 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 China’s current political system in general15.

4.2.2 Analysis

There are two sets of dependent variables in the analysis: belief in the specific 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 first compare

the rumors group with the control group (the baseline) to examine the political effects of

12See 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 pagedid not provide much additional substantive information, and because Chinese Internet users typically donot click on such links when they browse microblogging posts on their mobile devices (the most frequentform of social media consumption), the link was not activated in the experiment.

13The Web pages linked to in the rebuttals do not provide much additional information. The links werealso deactivated in the experiment.

14The exact wording was: “On a scale from 1 to 7, with 1 being ‘strongly disagree’ and 7 being ‘stronglyagree’, indicate the extent to which you agree with the following statements: 1) in general, we can trust ourgovernment’s work in improving public safety and protecting people’s 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: ingeneral, China’s political system is appropriate for us today.”

16

rumors. Then I compare the rebuttal groups with the rumor group (the baseline) to see the

effects of rebuttals on 1) belief in the specific 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 Rumor 1B Public Equal PoliticalBelief Belief Safety Treatment System

Control 4.53 3.90 5.08(N=125) (1.45) (1.82) (1.36)

Rumors 5.23 4.35 4.20 3.30 4.73(N=127) (1.41) (1.59) (1.53) (1.81) (1.46)

Rebut 1A 4.86 4.04 4.78(N=134) (1.48) (1.61) (1.32)

Rebut 1B 4.38 3.44 4.94(N=127) (1.58) (1.72) (1.35)

Rebut Both 4.54 4.28 4.27 3.31 4.96(N=118) (1.68) (1.64) (1.47) (1.55) (1.35)

Experiment 2

Rumor 2A Rumor 2B Citizen Officials’ PoliticalBelief Belief Protection Family System

Control 4.41 2.42 4.75(N=177) (1.65) (1.44) (1.37)

Rumors 5.03 4.46 4.13 2.53 4.46(N=167) (1.70) (1.73) (1.78) (1.69) (1.55)

Rebut 2A 4.35 4.50 4.64(N=172) (1.85) (1.61) (1.56)

Rebut 2B 3.78 2.86 4.59(N=133) (1.57) (1.52) (1.43)

Rebut Both 4.17 3.85 4.41 2.52 4.84(N=150) (1.77) (1.60) (1.55) (1.39) (1.38)

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

16I 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 effects in experimental

analysis (Maxwell and Delaney 2004, chap. 9). Besides the usual demographic variables,

they include consumption of mainstream news, political affiliation (CCP membership),

prior political attitudes, and level of political interests, which can potentially condition

the effects 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 effects of rumors in the first experiment on the respondents’ trust

of the government in rumor-related policy areas and their evaluation of China’s overall

political system. Rumors significantly reduced the respondents’ political attitudes toward

the government and state in all three cases, which was consistent with H1. Converting

the ordered probit coefficients 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 coefficient (in absolute size). The control

group’s probability of assigning a relatively high trust level–5, 6, or 7–on public safety was

respectively 28.1%, 21.3%, and 6.8%, but the rumor group’s 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,

17Pro-Western orientation was measured as the sum of a respondent’s degree of agreement with thefollowing two statements, with responses to the second statement reversely coded: 1) “We must strive tolearn from the West in terms of institutions, culture, and thoughts”; 2) “We must strive to maintain ourown institutions, culture, and way of life.”

18

it increased the probability of assigning a relatively low level of trust on public safety–1,

2, or 3–from 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: Effects of Rumors on Political Attitudes: Rumor vs Control (Experiment 1)

Public Safety Equal Treatment Political System

Rumor -0.257∗ (0.132) -0.350∗∗∗ (0.133) -0.266∗∗ (0.134)

News 0.123∗∗ (0.059) 0.0246 (0.060) 0.019 (0.059)

Poli Interest 0.126 (0.088) -0.040 (0.088) 0.164∗ (0.089)

Pro-West -0.083∗ (0.046) 0.002 (0.046) -0.157∗∗∗ (0.047)

Age -0.007 (0.012) -0.016 (0.012) -0.015 (0.012)

Male -0.166 (0.145) -0.154 (0.146) -0.089 (0.146)

Education -0.037 (0.076) -0.033 (0.077) 0.107 (0.077)

Income -0.016 (0.106) -0.026 (0.107) -0.012 (0.107)

CCP Member 0.006 (0.195) 0.124 (0.195) -0.080 (0.196)

Cut 1 -1.940∗∗∗ (0.556) -1.869∗∗∗ (0.552) -2.133∗∗∗ (0.563)Cut 2 -1.255∗∗ (0.543) -1.351∗∗ (0.549) -1.643∗∗∗ (0.552)Cut 3 -0.590 (0.540) -0.875 (0.546) -1.199** (0.549)Cut 4 -0.061 (0.539) -0.434 (0.544) -0.562 (0.545)Cut 5 0.675 (0.540) 0.005 (0.545) 0.231 (0.543)Cut 6 1.585∗∗∗ (0.550) 0.714 (0.551) 1.224∗∗ (0.548)

N 252 252 252Pseudo R2 0.018 0.011 0.028

Standard errors in parentheses. ∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01.

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 coefficient

than rumors), suggesting that officially sanctioned news in an authoritarian country have

lower influence on public opinion than unofficial rumors. Pro-Western orientations, un-

surprisingly, tended to reduce the respondents’ trust of the government and evaluation of

China’s political system. These results will remain robust or become even stronger in the

following regressions.

19

Table 3 shows the effects of rebuttals on the respondents’ belief in the content of the

rumors. Rebutting a rumor indeed significantly 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 effect was not significant for rumor 1B. Converting the coefficients 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 Rumor 1B

Rebut 1A -0.307∗∗ (0.132)

Rebut 1B -0.286∗∗ (0.131)

Rebut Both -0.495∗∗∗ (0.135) -0.027 (0.133)

Rumor 1Abf 0.061 (0.125)

Rumor 1Bbf 0.364∗∗∗ (0.110)

News -0.042 (0.048) -0.088∗ (0.048)

Poli Interest -0.067 (0.072) 0.013 (0.070)

Pro-West 0.055 (0.039) 0.015 (0.039)

Age -0.008 (0.011) -0.002 (0.010)

Male 0.221∗ (0.116) 0.123 (0.113)

Education 0.002 (0.060) 0.0210 (0.063)

Income 0.116 (0.081) 0.008 (0.084)

CCP Member -0.029 (0.168) 0.034 (0.166)

Cut 1 -2.201∗∗∗ (0.505) -1.557∗∗∗ (0.467)Cut 2 -1.542∗∗∗ (0.493) -1.030∗∗ (0.461)Cut 3 -1.079∗∗ (0.489) -0.499 (0.459)Cut 4 -0.483 (0.487) 0.025 (0.459)Cut 5 0.089 (0.488) 0.754 (0.462)Cut 6 0.935∗ (0.490) 1.595∗∗∗ (0.468)

N 379 372Pseudo R2 0.016 0.015

Standard errors in parentheses. ∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ 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 one’s belief in

the rumors in any significant way. Being male increased one’s belief in one of the two ru-

mors, but as the second experiment will show, this gender effect 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 significance

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, official information and media are widely regarded as bi-

ased 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 significant 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 significant effect in improving the respondents’ attitudes toward the government

(some coefficients 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 effective in recovering people’s trust and evaluation of the

government. Rebuttals’ effects on political attitudes and belief in specific rumors can be

divergent.

To sum up, in the first experiment rumors had negative effects on the respondents’ atti-

21

Table 4: Effects of Rebuttals on Political Attitudes: Rebuttal vs Rumor (Experiment 1)

Public Safety Equal Treatment Political System

Rebut 1A -0.136 (0.131) -0.032 (0.131)

Rebut 1B 0.057 (0.131) 0.083 (0.131)

Rebut Both 0.015 (0.133) -0.020 (0.134) 0.116 (0.134)

Rumor 1Abf -0.098 (0.125) 0.082 (0.108)

Rumor 1Bbf -0.161 (0.109) -0.155∗ (0.094)

News 0.085∗ (0.048) -0.017 (0.048) -0.024 (0.041)

Poli Interest 0.010 (0.071) -0.003 (0.071) 0.144∗∗ (0.062)

Pro-West 0.026 (0.038) -0.029 (0.039) -0.126∗∗∗ (0.034)

Age -0.003 (0.011) -0.010 (0.010) -0.012 (0.009)

Male -0.001 (0.114) -0.101 (0.113) -0.067 (0.098)

Education -0.030 (0.060) -0.041 (0.064) 0.093∗ (0.054)

Income 0.298∗∗∗ (0.082) 0.169∗∗ (0.085) 0.312∗∗∗ (0.072)

CCP Member -0.004 (0.167) -0.019 (0.167) 0.033 (0.146)

Cut 1 -0.719 (0.489) -1.203∗∗∗ (0.467) -1.137∗∗∗ (0.429)Cut 2 -0.132 (0.484) -0.674 (0.466) -0.739∗ (0.422)Cut 3 0.479 (0.484) -0.122 (0.465) -0.227 (0.419)Cut 4 1.035∗∗ (0.485) 0.371 (0.465) 0.445 (0.419)Cut 5 1.811∗∗∗ (0.489) 0.887∗ (0.466) 1.279∗∗∗ (0.421)Cut 6 2.536∗∗∗ (0.497) 1.616∗∗∗ (0.475) 2.343∗∗∗ (0.428)

N 379 372 506Pseudo R2 0.014 0.008 0.030

Standard errors in parentheses. ∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ 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 specific rumors. With regards to recovering the respondents’

attitudes toward the government and state, however, these simple and quasi-official denials

consistently failed.

22

4.3 Experiment 2

4.3.1 The Experiment

The second experiment used the same procedure as the first but a different 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 differences between the two experiments

were the quality and sources of rebuttals, as shown below.

Rumor 2A was about the Chinese government’s (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 fix 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 han-

dle @JiangningGong’anZaixian (Jiangning Police Online). The rebuttal, accompanied by

photos of relevant pages of the Chinese and American passports (see Figure 1), provided de-

tailed information in a vivid manner—one piece of detail showed that the real situation was

actually somewhat opposite to the allegation of the rumor: @JiangningGong’anZaixian:

18The 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 wellas a developed foreign country.”

19The online rumor was typically accompanied with a photo showing the cover of a Chinese passportand the photo page of a US passport. The photo, shown in the experiment, is omitted here.

23

The alleged difference between Chinese and American passports is a false rumor. The first

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 first page of the Chinese

passport says: “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs 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 afford 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 effect

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 traffic accident involving a luxury sports car, but it clearly

alluded to the profligate lifestyles and suspicious income sources of some Chinese govern-

ment officials’ family members (and the related policy issue is whether the government

will restrict officials’ family members from improperly enriching themselves through gov-

ernment 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-year-

old Chinese man from Sichuan named Ma Chi, who went to Singapore in 2008, engaged

in finance and investment activities, and was in the process of applying for permanent

20The 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).

21The wording of the survey question was: “Indicate the extent to which you agree with the followingstatement: In general, we can trust that our government officials will restrict their family members not toenrich themselves through improper means or engage in other inappropriate behavior.”

24

Figure 1: Pictures in Rebuttal 2A

residency. Internet users have found from human flesh searching that Ma Chi’s father is

probably a high level official 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 govern-

ment 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 prolific Weibo posts. As a re-

22The State Council is China’s cabinet. The online rumor was typically accompanied with a photo of acar crash. The photo, shown in the experiment, is omitted here.

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 official. What bullshit logic is this? Everyone who knows

the truth should fight with this sort of nonsensical rumors and fabrications.24

4.3.2 Analysis

Table 5 shows the effects of rumors in this experiment on the respondents’ political at-

titudes. Rumors reduced the respondents’ trust of Chinese government’s protection of

citizens abroad and evaluation of the political system, similar to the first experiment and

consistent with H1. Rumors, however, had no effect on trust of government officials disci-

plining 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 group’s mean trust on this issue was only 2.4 on a seven-point scale, significantly

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 effects of rebuttals on the respondents’ belief in the rumors. Rebut-

ting the rumors again reduced the respondents’ belief in them, consistent with H225. 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

23See his Weibo post http://www.weibo.com/1182389073/zdq2cDPg5 (last accessed March 22, 2013).24See http://www.weibo.com/1182389073/yl6wRkFCw for the original rebuttal (last accessed Oct. 6,

2012).25In results not reported here, I also find that rebutting the rumors reduced the respondents’ willingness

to pass the rumors on to others.

26

Table 5: Effects of Rumors on Political Attitudes: Rumor vs Control (Experiment 2)

Citizen Protection Officials’ Family Political System

Rumor -0.187∗ (0.112) 0.006 (0.117) -0.228∗∗ (0.113)

News 0.007 (0.049) 0.078 (0.052) 0.051 (0.049)

Political Interest 0.054 (0.077) -0.063 (0.082) 0.012 (0.078)

Pro-West -0.113∗∗∗ (0.042) -0.071 (0.045) -0.187∗∗∗ (0.043)

Age -0.007 (0.012) -0.035∗∗∗ (0.014) -0.030∗∗ (0.013)

Male 0.080 (0.119) 0.032 (0.125) 0.162 (0.120)

Education 0.030 (0.067) 0.075 (0.069) 0.017 (0.067)

Income 0.148∗ (0.084) 0.184∗∗ (0.090) 0.218∗∗∗ (0.085)

CCP Member 0.402∗∗ (0.166) 0.137 (0.170) 0.509∗∗∗ (0.168)

Cut 1 -1.230∗∗ (0.486) -0.400 (0.504) -2.067∗∗∗ (0.495)Cut 2 -0.745 (0.482) 0.164 (0.504) -1.784∗∗∗ (0.491)Cut 3 -0.186 (0.481) 0.670 (0.505) -1.177∗∗ (0.486)Cut 4 0.234 (0.481) 1.155∗∗ (0.508) -0.617 (0.485)Cut 5 0.879∗ (0.481) 1.544∗∗∗ (0.512) 0.294 (0.485)Cut 6 1.626∗∗∗ (0.486) 2.075∗∗∗ (0.529) 1.374∗∗∗ (0.490)

N 344 344 344Pseudo R2 0.017 0.017 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

significant or consistent effects on the respondents’ belief in the rumors. CCP membership

reduced the respondents’ belief in one of the rumors, but education actually increased be-

lief 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 effects of rebuttals on

political attitudes, and here the two experiments exhibited notable differences. Table 7

shows that the detailed and vivid rebuttal of the passport rumor (2A) significantly 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 significantly

27

Table 6: Belief in Rumors: Rebuttal vs Rumor (Experiment 2)

2A Belief 2B Belief

Rebut 2A -0.407∗∗∗ (0.114)

Rebut 2B -0.422∗∗∗ (0.121)

Rebut Both -0.511∗∗∗ (0.118) -0.357∗∗∗ (0.117)

Rumor 2Abf 0.180∗ (0.095)

Rumor 2Bbf 0.274∗∗∗ (0.101)

News 0.028 (0.042) 0.007 (0.044)

Poli Interest 0.070 (0.062) 0.026 (0.067)

Pro-West 0.066∗ (0.035) 0.054 (0.037)

Age 0.014 (0.010) -0.016 (0.010)

Male -0.084 (0.099) -0.043 (0.100)

Education 0.021 (0.055) 0.104∗ (0.056)

Income -0.113 (0.071) -0.016 (0.071)

CCP Membership -0.060 (0.137) -0.315∗∗ (0.140)

Cut 1 -1.020∗∗ (0.412) -1.417∗∗∗ (0.414)Cut 2 -0.685∗ (0.410) -0.865∗∗ (0.412)Cut 3 -0.365 (0.409) -0.248 (0.410)Cut 4 0.230 (0.409) 0.350 (0.409)Cut 5 0.775∗ (0.409) 0.898∗∗ (0.409)Cut 6 1.392∗∗∗ (0.412) 1.497∗∗∗ (0.414)

N 489 450Pseudo R2 0.020 0.021

Standard errors in parentheses. ∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01.

increased their trust on government officials disciplining their family members. In addition,

rebutting both rumors significantly increased their evaluation of China’s political system.

The coefficients of rebuttals in other cases, however, are not significant. Rebutting either

rumor 2A or rumor 2B, for example, had no significant effect in improving the respondents’

evaluation of China’s 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 officials’

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: Effects of Rebuttals on Political Attitudes: Rebuttal vs Rumor (Experiment 2)

Citizen Protection Officials’ Family Political System

Rebut 2A 0.234∗∗ (0.112) 0.139 (0.113)

Rebut 2B 0.267∗∗ (0.125) 0.0552 (0.121)

Rebut Both 0.145 (0.116) 0.027 (0.121) 0.238∗∗ (0.117)

Rumor 2Abf -0.082 (0.094) -0.184∗∗ (0.085)

Rumor 2Bbf -0.288∗∗∗ (0.105) -0.226∗∗∗ (0.086)

News -0.030 (0.042) 0.104∗∗ (0.046) 0.012 (0.037)

Political Interest 0.099 (0.062) -0.033 (0.070) 0.062 (0.055)

Pro-West -0.081∗∗ (0.035) -0.071∗ (0.039) -0.109∗∗∗ (0.032)

Age -0.002 (0.010) -0.024∗∗ (0.010) -0.018∗∗ (0.009)

Male -0.005 (0.097) 0.007 (0.104) 0.023 (0.086)

Education -0.029 (0.055) 0.031 (0.058) -0.004 (0.048)

Income 0.224∗∗∗ (0.070) 0.293∗∗∗ (0.076) 0.276∗∗∗ (0.062)

CCP Member 0.257∗ (0.137) 0.351∗∗ (0.143) 0.295∗∗ (0.123)

Cut 1 -1.055∗∗∗ (0.408) 0.016 (0.426) -1.579∗∗∗ (0.364)Cut 2 -0.550 (0.405) 0.591 (0.427) -1.173∗∗∗ (0.360)Cut 3 -0.035 (0.404) 1.076∗∗ (0.428) -0.757∗∗ (0.357)Cut 4 0.519 (0.405) 1.675∗∗∗ (0.430) -0.059 (0.357)Cut 5 1.120∗∗∗ (0.406) 2.290∗∗∗ (0.435) 0.741** (0.358)Cut 6 1.887∗∗∗ (0.409) 2.671∗∗∗ (0.447) 1.673∗∗∗ (0.362)

N 489 450 622Pseudo R2 0.016 0.031 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 first 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 specific rumors remained after the rebuttals,

and rebuttals did not improve political trust and evaluation in all cases.

5 Discussion and Conclusion

Rumors in authoritarian countries, as societal propaganda against the state (in effect if

not in purpose), are highly prevalent, visible, and politically significant, and yet there

has been a dearth of quantitative studies about the political effects of rumors in such

countries and whether rumors can be effectively countered, perhaps due to the difficulty 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, offers an opportunity to carefully

study this important phenomenon. This paper provides such a study using experiments,

where causal effects 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 ef-

fectiveness of rebuttals, they also reveal a crucial aspect of rumor rebuttals that has been

largely neglected. Previous scholarship has focused on how different types of rebuttals

affect people’s belief in the specific content of rumors, not how they affect people’s po-

litical attitudes. The current results show that the divergent effects of different types of

rebuttals operate more on the political and policy dimension than on the specific content

of rumors: belief in rumors themselves is generally (though not completely) responsive to

30

correction, but the effects 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 first 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 pic-

ture 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 influence of such messages to some extent, if the counter mes-

sages 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 effects 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 effectiveness at the

rumor level does not necessarily mean effectiveness at a higher political level. Only strong

and well-evidenced rebuttals and those from a source broadly perceived to be independent

can be effective at both the political level and the rumor level, which is a key finding of

this paper.

31

One may wonder if the effects 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 effect of a particular rumor (or rebuttal) on citizens’ political attitudes might

be temporary, the accumulated effects of experiencing such messages on a regular basis will

be long lasting. The effects of rumors and rebuttals revealed in this paper are therefore

not confined to the experimental setting.

This study has focused on routine rumors emerged out of society about various govern-

ment wrongdoings, and future work can continue to investigate the effects of such rumors

and their rebuttals, since the current paper is only a first step in this line of research. Future

studies, however, can also extend into other types of rumors, such as those about coups or

political infighting, or rumors deliberately planted by the state’s 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.

32

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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

DemographicsExperiment Experiment Chinese

1 2 Internet Users∗

Gender: Female 43.90% 45.68% 44.1%Location: Rural 28.37% 17.02% 26.5%

Occupation

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 office worker 16.96% 20.78% 9.9%Corporate management 3.33% 4.51% 4.0%

Government worker 2.06% 2.25% 5.2%Government official 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%

Education

Primary school 0.16% 0.21% 8.5%Junior high 3.65% 2.93% 35.7%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%

Age

< 10 0% 0% 1.7%10-19 7.13% 6.58% 26.7%20-29 78.13% 78.9% 29.8%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).

1

Table S2: Balance and Descriptive Statistics of Independent Variables

News Poli Pro- Age Male Edu Income CCP Rumor RumorInterest West Member Abf Bbf

Experiment 1

Control 3.93 2.71 3.07 25.07 .59 4.46 2.86 .15(N=125) (1.31) (.81) (1.45) (4.90) (.49) (.88) (.65) (.36)Rumors 3.98 2.74 2.95 25.91 .60 4.28 2.69 .15 .80 .55(N=127) (1.26) (.83) (1.44) (6.39) (.49) (.94) (.62) (.36) (.40) (.50)Rebut 1A 3.79 2.61 3.05 23.51 .49 4.35 2.78 .12 .70 .47(N=134) (1.26) (.79) (1.35) (3.95) (.50) (.87) (.70) (.33) (.46) (.50)Rebut 1B 3.87 2.71 2.69 25.11 .54 4.46 2.78 .13 .72 .54(N=127) (1.32) (.81) (1.33) (5.02) (.50) (.82) (.62) (.34) (.45) (.50)Rebut Both 3.91 2.66 2.89 24.31 .59 4.31 2.78 .12 .74 .49(N=118) (1.25) (.87) (1.42) (5.11) (.49) (.95) (.68) (.32) (.44) (.50)

F 0.39 0.49 1.59 4.04 1.25 1.08 1.07 0.27 1.34 0.73Prob > F 0.817 0.741 0.175 0.003 0.288 0.365 0.369 0.896 0.260 0.535

Experiment 2

Control 4.21 2.84 2.95 24.50 .51 4.21 2.77 .12(N=177) (1.20) (.85) (1.31) (4.23) (.50) (.89) (.63) (.33)Rumors 4.08 2.83 2.84 24.79 .59 4.27 2.77 .16 .51 .50(N=167) (1.27) (.79) (1.38) (4.98) (.49) (.87) (.74) (.37) (.50) (.50)Rebut 2A 4.12 2.82 3.05 24.67 .58 4.31 2.80 .12 .46 .42(N=172) (1.19) (.92) (1.36) (4.19) (.50) (.91) ( .65) (.33) (.50) (.50)Rebut 2B 4.02 2.78 2.83 25.17 .51 4.29 2.80 .11 .40 .44(N=133) (1.37) (.87) (1.27) (5.70) (.50) (.93) (.69) (.32) (.49) (.50)Rebut Both 4.07 2.83 2.83 24.60 .53 4.15 2.77 .19 .49 .47(N=150) (1.22) (.83) (1.29) (5.03) (.50) (.96) (.69) (.40) (.50) (.50)

F 0.52 0.09 0.83 0.401 0.89 0.77 0.12 1.43 1.38 0.70Prob > F 0.724 0.985 0.507 0.808 0.467 0.543 0.975 0.224 0.247 0.553

Entries are group means for each covariate, with standard deviations in parentheses. Bartlett’s test for equal

variances is satisfied for all covariates except age. The F* test was used for age in lieu of the standard F test.

2