A Study on the User Comments of Tik Tok’s Official Account to Dispel COVID-19 Rumors

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-523-2_5How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Tik Tok; user comments; rumor-dispelling effect

Abstract

In public health emergencies, online rumors have a significant impact on society and public life. Refuting rumors is a key means to combat these rumors, but its effect is not always positive, and sometimes even backfire. In September 2022, a rumor about lung nodules caused a stir on China’s Tik Tok platform, and the official account quickly released a video refuting the rumor. The purpose of this study is to explore the reception of Chinese Tik Tok users to the official rumor-refuting information, and analyze the rumor-refuting news comments published by 30 official Blue V accounts to clarify the emotional tendency of users. Through collecting and analyzing 818602 comments, 928 valid comments were obtained by random sampling using Octopus crawler software. The analysis showed that 45% of the comments were negative, 40% positive and 15% neutral. Further regression analysis revealed that factors such as “like”, “comment”, “save” and “share” had significant effects on emotional tendencies. The results suggest that in China, despite official efforts to dispel rumors, the results are not entirely ideal. This suggests that the government and relevant departments need to take more effective measures to promote public trust in official information. At the same time, the study also reflects the diversity of Chinese society in terms of information acceptance, and the proportion of negative comments is noteworthy, which provides an important reference for strengthening public health awareness and preventing the spread of rumors.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jing Du
AU  - Siyoung Pyo
AU  - Seongku Hong
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/29
TI  - A Study on the User Comments of Tik Tok’s Official Account to Dispel COVID-19 Rumors
BT  - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on New Media Development and Modernised Education (NMDME 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 32
EP  - 43
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-523-2_5
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-523-2_5
ID  - Du2025
ER  -