Study Of Online Rumors’ Regulation

On the base of defined nature of rumor and the conditions of internet, the analysisof the new of it will be made. On the analysis, the improved regulating model will beprovided through the exploration of boundaries, problems and effectiveness withempirical approach. The article will make answers to the two questions as follows:how to treat and regulate the online rumors in the internet era.Firstly, the discussion of the online rumors is within the public sphere. When aperson separates the private life from the social life after he comes out of the familyand enters into society, the rumor develops instantly with it. In this article, it isbelieved that after the development, the public sphere eventually become thepublic-view characteristic market between the nation and the society. With thedevelopment of the internet, it endures fundermental reforms from being tools tobeing space, from the technologists to the ordinary people as the main body, and fromdigital private life to the digital group as lifestyle. After the three reforms above, theinternet eventually becomes a public sphere in which the equal participants involve asthe master and different from the nation and the society. On this point, the internetshould be regard as virtual pulic sphere. No matter Hannah Arendt or Habermasregards the communicative acts on the base of speech as the basic method ofcommunication. As a communicative act, rumor exists at the beginning of the publicsphere. In Athens of ancient Greek, rumor was believed as the oracle and FamaChiarawas altared. In ancient Greek, Fama Chiara could be seen in all kinds of public spheres and used as political rhetoric in usual days, wars and elections. In theEuropean Middle Ages, rumors still spread in the public sphere. In China, rumoralways was taken as the information in popular discussion and just because of this, theemperors took information from the popular rumors. So,the public sphere should becalled the fertile ground.Secondly, it is believed that rumor should be a right to freedom of expression innature. The first dictionary, Er Ya, explained rumor as a song without accompany. Butin modern society, there are two meanings of “rumor”, fake or baseless, which is notincluded in it in Han Dynasty. In Han Dynasty, gossip was the fake information whileaugury, or heresy, was the baseless one. In semantic, there is no material relationshipbetween the words above. Rumor is just a song, the media of word. And just becauserumor is the real words without any explicit, it just means the words from the viewsand attitudes among the people. In order to maintain the legality, the emperors alwaysdefined the unexplainable and disagreeable popular discussions as heresy. Rumor issimilar with heresy in Chinese pronunciation and still used in today. In public sphere,rumor is more expression than speech. Rumor is discussion and critique to public andnational affairs and reflects the subjective attitude. Rumor spreads the attitude to thepublic and national affairs as well as the information about them. So rumor is a kindof collective action. In other words, when it is worked out, rumor belongs to thepublic groups in which anybody is possible to spread and reorganize it and brings itsown subjective thoughts in it. From the developing mechanism, rumor is a multi-agentexpression act with altruism as its aim, with the public affairs as object and withcommunity supervision as a way.Last, it is believed that the effect of the regulation is decided by the location ofregulation borders. In this article, rumor is a kind of expression act. In the existinglegal system, the distinction between expression freedom and speech freedom shouldbe made at first. The international society always expresses it with expressionfreedom. But according the Chinese Constitution, the speech freedom is a kind ofstate of act. That is speech is listed equally in the acts such as the press, assembly,association, procession and demonstration. As an expression of personal rights and emotions, the criticisms and suggestions to the public officials and personal creationsincluding academic research and literary works are regard as the content of theexpression. For example, if a person celebrates his own speculation that theearthquake would happen on a certain day,it is a freedom of speech. But it is afreedom of expression that when, for what, where and with what the person abovespreads this speculation. If the person spreads it on internet in a place where there’s abad weather forecast, then, the freedom should be checked. The objective of thespreading is an important standard of the distinction between the expression freedomand speech freedom. It is difficult to find the object through the act classification onformal social controlling mechanism. The article will introduce the informal socialcontrolling mechanism in it. Furthermore, the article expands the traditional standardswhich includes “illegal act” and “legal act” into the new standards which include“reasonable act”,”unreasonable act”,“disobeyed deviant act” and “non-violateddeviant act and believe that the online rumors of the latter two become the regulatingdifficulty. Through the reintroduction of social functions of act as a standard, the“disobeyed deviant act” and “non-violated deviant act” should be transferred to“illegal positive function” and “legal negative function”, the self-benefitedrumormongers should be regard as subjective while the altruistic ones should beregard that they are protect, not violate, the social interest, public interest and interestsof others on the standard of the objective of spreading. So the latter should be definedand solved the latter act with social mechanism. On this point, altruistic rumor shouldbecome the critical point of regulating rumors with laws. To the different kinds ofonline rumors in nature, they should be controlled through formal social controllingmechanism and informal social controlling mechanism separately. And only throughthe method above, the regulation of online rumors become legal, legitimate and moreeffective.In the existing legal system, how is the effectiveness of online rumor regulation?This is another problem t waiting to be answered in this article. The actualeffectiveness decides the orientation and content of reconstructing the regulations.This article will make an answer through empirical study. The447online rumors taken in this study is the proved-false reported ones that happened on internet betweenJanuary,1,2011and December,31,2012. Through the empirical study, there is notenough illegalization and rationality in regulating online rumors in existing lawsystem. The disadvantage of the two above shows as follows: first, it is the limitationto the group act coming from personal act that reduce the three mismatches inapplication of law. second, limiting objective of act with invasion subject, that iswithout taking object of act as a standard confronted with the invasion subject, thelegalization of the online rumors punishment is discounted in the juridical practice;third, replace juridical restraint with juridical activism, that is for the official standardof online rumors giving the judicial office a great of discretion, combined with theconsisted juridical activism, the freedom of expression of the cyber citizens is possibleinvaded more easily; fourth, replacing the protection of rights with the controls of therights, that is according to Chinese Constitution, the good-will freedom of expressionshould be protected. But when the public interest conflicts with the personal interest,the juridical offices decline to define the rumors on the point of “limitation” but“protection”. It is very irrational in the practice; fifth, replace the negligence with thedeliberations. That is in juridical practice, the intent of online rumor spreading isdecided purely by the result of it and this creates the possibility that taking thenegligence as the deliberation by mistake. And this juridical action denies thesubjective of some online rumors existence, but also invades the personal rights ofcriticizing and suggesting. So it is irrational, too; and last, replacing juridicalrecognition with administrative recognition, that is the public security organ takesinvestigation, recognition, punishment and execution in all without supervision fromthe third party. Especially, in the basic juridical offices, judiciary becomes the toolsserving to the administrative.In this article, the problem is explored in the analytical positivism. In this study,the main tool is SPSS (Statistical Product for Social Sciences). Since development ofthis software in the early80ages,20centuries, SPPSS was used frequently in a lot offields, such as sociology, economics, media, public opinion poll and medical research.The traditional data analysis pattern can only make a general explain without the potential relationship of them. What SPSS solved is the scientificity which thetraditional data analysis cannot do. In the processes of using SPSS, the specificanalyzing tools include basic analysis, mutual analysis and regression analysis. Thebasic analysis includes a serial of basic data analyzing function, such as average,modal, median, percentage, maximum, minimum and so on. In this study, the data iscentralized-oriented distribution. The function of mutual analysis which calledcrosstabs or cross-over analysis is to make sure if the correlativity exists in thevariables. And the main tool in this study is the regression analysis, which is calledlogistic, too. The regression analysis is better than mutual analysis in a lot of aspects,but the most important one is that the former explores the existence of cause andeffect between the variables while the latter do the correlative relationship.With the empirical research, the problems of online rumors regulation in ournation comes from the causes as follows: on the one side, in the governance pattern,the online rumors regulation need to be reconstructured. Meantime, regulation is onlya kind of method governing the social governance while more cooperation of thesocial subjects is needed in the cyber community governance. According above, onthe regulation of online rumors, the legal and social regulation is needed equally. Onthe other hand, from the logical starting point, online rumor is a complex ofinformation and attitudes, so the regulation of online rumors should focus on clearingup not only the basic information but also the attitudes. As developed on the publicinternet, online rumor can exclude illegal or violated information from the publicthrough the reconstruction of law. Meanwhile, the regulation of online rumors shouldembody the legality and rationality of the juridical actions to protect the civil rights.Developed in the internet public sphere, the online rumors should be cleared upthrough the full discussion in it. Strictly, online act is difficult naturally with actualbehavior although we cannot deny that online act is possible to become actual one andonline rumors will influence the public and social interests. But the influence frominternet to reality is not checked justly. On this point, the governor should believefully that online rumors should be cleared up through the social strength such asmedia, social organization citizens, etc. And government should support the clearance with strong public sources. The vitality of internet is reflected through the applicationand upgrade of internet technologies. The internet brings some social problems, but itbrings the solutions to these problems too. Big Data is such a technology. In the onlinerumor regulation, Big Data should be use fully and provide the possibility ofclearance. This possibility does not come from the surveillance of government, butfrom the service of government.The concrete content of online rumors’ improvement includes the follows: first,the semantic reconstructure. That is in legal provisions, the illegal rumor spreading actshould be “spread unrecognized rumor to disrupt public order” other than “spreadrumors deliberately to disrupt public order.” Through the improvement, the illegal actshould be reduced which caused by the undefined content of the legal article; second,reconstructure of criterion of illegal rumor spreading. Nowadays, the criterion is notclear enough, so it is necessary to enlist all the conditions of rumors through the genreanalysis. Illegal online rumor spread should be divided into two types including sevenconditions. The conditions include “to be confirmed”(there is some evidence but notenough),“people’s guess”(there is reality but not provided by the people),“hearsay”(maybe there is some reality but unconfirmed),“conjecture”(there is realitybut not according to it exactly) and “distortion and fiction”(there is reality butdeliberately distorted, there is no reality but virtualization or not judged and appeared);third, the reconstructure of determination subject. There are two ways to realize it.They are improving juridical independence through taking all the rights ofinvestigation, recognition, punishment back to medium class People’s Court andPeoples’ Procuratorate and gradually making Basic People’s Court get rid of theactual dependence to local government and introducing the recognition of the thirdparty to make sure of the objectivity of recognizing the illegal act of online rumor andto realize the equality between the public interest and personal interest; fourth,reconstructure of quantitative criteria of illegalization. In this article, the suggestion isto delete the “forwarding500times” in the interpretation of the Superior Court andthe Superior Procuratorate because the premise of “forwarding500times” is“browsing10000times at least” and the price of it is immeasurable social influence. Meanwhile, the criteria should be “browsing5000times and the ratio of forwardingand browsing should at least be4‰” to prevent possibility of expanding right ofjudicial punishment.The informal social controlling mechanism of online rumors depends mainly on thesocial self-clearance function. First, on the information, the use of Big Data hasshown the charming in a all kinds of fields and data is becoming the most useful toolsto solve the professional difficulties and breaking the professional bottleneck. On thispoint, if the correlative relationship between rumor and information is confirmed, thedevelopment and spread of rumors will be reduced. The use of Big Data can ascertainthe social conditions of rumors’ development, for example, the rumors develop andspread most easily in the circumstance with the density of population is about1000people per square and most difficultly with the density of population is under100people per square or above3000people per square; most easily with the20,000-30,000rmb personal income in cities and towns and most difficultly with itunder10,000rmb or above40,000rmb;most easily when the urban-rural proportion isbetween2-3,most difficultly when it is equal or higher than3. The study with BigData can transform our thoughts of regulating rumors. According to the result ofempirical research, the social control methods do little to preventing the fakeinformation’s spread, such as improve the resident’s quality, enlarge the investment tothe city and control the size of floating population. It is a auxiliary evidence to theidea that it is a mental selection to spread the rumors and based on that, the preventingrumors spreading depends on the ways on the personal mention. At the same time, asa mutual assistant personal act, altruistic online rumors develop most in economicallydeveloped area with large density of population. Based on the Big Data, a nationshould provide sources to clear up the rumors in public sphere, such as construct arumor information database with the direct correlation of internet data to theconvenient of personal checking and proving the online rumors. In addition, thearticle believe that the attitudes com from the public and should be released throughthe full discussion in public sphere. Concretely, the distorted attitudes should becleared up effectively through the media comments and the attitudes disputes created by online rumors should be released through the social clearance method includingpersonal and social organization.Nowadays, there is not a common sense to the next state of internet development.But no matter how the internet develops, it is necessarily that online rumors shouldexist. The internet has two natures: the tools and the sociality. The concept of internetoriginates from the interchange of local information and matures from the interchangeof the information coming from different regions. The characteristic of internet is tosatisfy the personal communicative information needs. And the characteristic is apresentation of tools. But with the gradual mature of social applications, the internetwill make the sociality as its first nature. And the regulation on internet should mainlybase on the sociality. Regulation on online rumors will last. But it is not real to takeeliminating the online rumors as an objective. Technology method is a temporarysolution to online rumors while the change of thoughts is the fundamental one. Now,apparently, how to manage the virtual world becomes the difficulty and bottleneck tothe government. Fundamentally, the change of internet nature reflects the logicaldislocation of government management. In fact, the management to the virtual worldis a kind of social control problem not a governmental one. It is a confirmation thatthe virtual world is a space，which is called “space theory”, with the revealing ofsocial nature. The main body of the virtual world maybe coexists with the factualmain body. The “super-media” nature of internet changes the relationship betweenperson and information. Sociality became the most important characteristic of internet.While the government still governs the internet with authority idea and take the shapeof internet as “new media”. It is not a simple difference of names, but shows thefundamental one of thinking ways. Locating the issue on virtual world managementon the space theory is to establish the systematic, integrity and concertedness.“Regulation” is not “management”. The transform from “regulating” to“managing” virtual world is not simply a regulation model of government. It is moreimportant to introduce many related objective elements into management processesand to explore the concrete model and conditions of multi-master cooperation.Apparently, the internet has its media nature, but the virtual world is still a standard of society. Although the internet has its own organization ability, the regulation of virtualworld is not achieved by the innumerable cyber citizens spontaneously. Although thelaws on internet can become a method of regulating internet, the law should bereference system to preserve the public order. In order to achieve the perfect state ofthe virtual world, multi-masters led by the government should build a balanced andcooperative internet order on the people-oriented value idea, service-oriented center,public direction and well-management.