The Influencing Factors Of Rumor Transmission On Microblog During Social Crisis

With the emergence of Microblog and other social media services, more and more people use social media to participate in online interaction. Microblog has become an indispensable part of People’s Daily life, has increasingly become the platform of public opinion. As a kind of public opinion, rumor attached to the media and along with the upgrading of medium evolvement. The birth of the social media created a broad stage for rumor, and also provided new ideas for the rumor study. The purpose of this study is to explore the influencing factors of rumor transmission under Microblog context during social crisis, and how do they work.Based on extensive literature review of rumor studies, this study summarizes the definition of rumor, and distinguishes rumor, gossip and urban legend from context, content and function. By analyzing and comparing the mode of information transferred during the evolution of media, this study divides rumor studies into three phases:traditional media rumor study; computer mediated rumor study and social media rumor study. By teasing out the first phase studies, we summarize the factors and motivations facilitating rumor activities and the mechanism of rumor generation and transmission; by reviewing the second phase, we summarize the advantages and new methods in the computer mediated situation; by analyzing the last phase and the features of social media, we suggest the significance to study rumor transmission under social media context.On the basis of literature review, this study combined with the feature of Microblog, put forward the model of influence factors of rumor transmission on Microblog during social crisis. As a case study of "MH370 lost", this study collected messages from Sina Microblog about this incident. In strict accordance with the content analysis method, we coded the random samples and received 817 valid data. Binary logistic regression has been used to test the research model; the main conclusions are as follows. Source ambiguity, social ties, content ambiguity have significant positive influence on rumor transmission, attitude toward the incident has a significant negative influence on rumor transmission. In addition, anonymity has negative influence on rumor transmission, such as the ambiguity of user name will promote rumor transmission, and users with tags will suppress to transmit rumor. Our analysis reveals that source ambiguity is the most important, attitude toward the incident next in importance and social ties slightly greater than content ambiguity. After summarized the results of this study, we put forward the theory and practice implications. And in the analysis of the limitations of this study, this paper puts forward several future research directions.