Arouse fear with exaggerated pictures and texts

The School of Communication and Design of Sun Yat-sen University and WeChat jointly launched the 1 issue of WeChat rumor analysis, and conducted a text analysis of 255 official WeChat account articles reported by WeChat users as "fraud and false information" during this year1October 3 -20.

The analysis results show that these rumors have a strong rule: first, 65% of the topics in this kind of news revolve around three major death anxiety themes: personal safety, food safety and disease health; Secondly, I like to use exaggerated words such as "100%" and "first" with a lot of pictures to arouse people's fear of death; Finally, its sources are usually unprofessional and have poor relevance to the subject.

These topics will arouse everyone's curiosity and want to see what is going on, so it is easy to have high click-through rate and high forwarding. Relatively speaking, the post-60 s and post-70 s are easy to become the main force of rumors, rumors and rumors. However, the post-80s and post-90s can get more comprehensive information because they spend a long time online, while college students are mainly in the post-80s and post-90s, so they have a strong ability to identify rumors.

Digitalization+Multi-images+Terror Consequences

Rumors of using numbers such as "100%" and "number one" exceeded 1/4(27%). In this way, there is no authoritative source data to highlight your objectivity and accuracy, so as to achieve the purpose of exaggeration and assertion. For example, "these ordinary things can increase your life span by 30 years!" " And so on.

Statistics show that these rumors are accompanied by an average of 3.56 pictures. Because everyone believes that seeing is believing, these pictures often give people a strong visual impact.

Analysis shows that 33% of these rumors contain death evocation, such as "disfigurement", "toxic", "carcinogenic" and "death" and other related words are often used. Among them, 48% will cause readers to panic, and people tend to adopt a conservative psychology of "believing in what it has but not believing in what it has".

It is very easy to arouse people's fear of death through "undeniable evidence" such as figures and pictures, plus serious consequences such as "toxic and carcinogenic". This information will also arouse people's strong desire to protect their relatives and friends, which is why your parents like to brush such messages in the circle of friends.

How to quickly identify rumors

See if it's old. This rumor has the characteristics of repeated dissemination. Some old posts will be slightly modified by different people every once in a while and then spread again.

Second, see if the information source is reliable. Most of these reported rumors come from some accounts, and their consistent posting content is relatively watery. For example, recent reports include Daily Wonderful, High-quality Life Knowledge and Success Wisdom. For the official WeChat account, a WeChat account with high rumor frequency, netizens should be extra careful when reading the articles published by it. In addition, it depends on whether its professional orientation matches the news theme. Generally speaking, accounts that often send chicken soup for the soul are not as reliable as medical special numbers on medical issues. Of course, the medical special number depends on whether it has been certified by an authoritative organization.