An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Social Media Use On The Credibility Of Political Rumors

With the development of new media technology,the number of Internet users using social media such as microblog,we-chat and forum has increased rapidly.As a close participant in information production and dissemination,Internet users are the main force in the use of social media,and the social media platform has become a "large-scale folk public opinion field".There are contradictions and conflicts between the information dissemination of folk public opinion and official public opinion,and the birth and dissemination rate of political rumors have also increased significantly.Government rumor refutation has become a daily problem,and the failure of rumor refutation is a difficult problem faced by the government.Therefore,it is an urgent topic to study the impact of Internet users’ social media use on the credibility of political rumors and explore the causes of the failure of government rumor refutation,which is also the focus of this thesis.This study introduces "government trust" as the intermediary variable,selects the independent variable as social media use,and the dependent variable as political rumor credibility.It carries out an empirical study to prove that social media use affects political rumor credibility by affecting government trust.In order to effectively overcome the endogenous,it also selects the variable non political rumor credibility as a placebo test.The research data is based on 2379 samples of cgss2017 "Internet users’ social awareness survey" database.By using OLS and multivariate logit methods,an econometric model regression analysis is constructed to test the relevant research hypotheses.The regression results show that:(1)without introducing the intermediary variable "government trust",the impact of Internet users’ social media use on the credibility of political rumors is positive,and the results are significant,indicating that Internet users using social media will think that political rumors are more credible;At the same time,the local government(official media)and an independent media person(we media)will have different refutation effects on political rumors,that is,the local government’s Refutation fails,while the independent media person’s Refutation is effective.(2)After introducing the intermediary variable of "government trust",the regression coefficient and significance of variable social media use decreased,indicating that the impact of social media use on the credibility of political rumors is indeed realized partly by affecting government trust;After the rumor was refuted by the local government(official media)and an independent media person(we media),the regression coefficient also decreased;This comprehensive shows that government trust does play the role of intermediary variable,and the use of social media has an impact on the credibility of political rumors by affecting government trust.(3)When measuring the impact of netizens’ use of social media on the trust of different government institutions,it is found that netizens’ trust in local government is significantly reduced.This result is just consistent with the failure of local government rumor refutation,indicating that netizens’ use of social media will reduce their trust in local government,so they will think that the political rumor of local government is more credible.(4)The regression results of non political rumor credibility of variables as placebo test are not significant,indicating that there are no missing variables in the regression results of key variables.To sum up,this thesis believes that standardizing the use of social media is an effective channel to enhance netizens’ trust in the government,and improving netizens’ trust in the government is the key to the reconstruction of consensus between official media and we media.If the official media and we media reach a consensus in the communication process,it will help alleviate the current situation of government rumor refutation failure to a certain extent.