“Positive Energy”: Perceptions and Attitudes Towards COVID-19 Information on Social Media in China

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The outbreak of COVID-19 has resulted in a worldwide public health crisis. In such times of crisis, access to relevant and accurate information is critical. For many people in China, domestic social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo have become dominant sources of COVID-19-related information and news. On these platforms, government censorship policies, astroturfers, and other government interventions have contributed to an increasingly complex social media environment. People have to evaluate the trustworthiness of COVID-19-related information and make sharing decisions in such a complex environment. We conducted interviews with 33 Chinese WeChat users to understand how individuals were seeking COVID-19-related information and how they identified and evaluated specific COVID-19-related misinformation. This work exposes that COVID-19-related content with ‘positive energy’ is prevalent on social media in China. A significant number of interviewees exhibited a willingness to prioritize information valence over veracity when evaluating and sharing content with others. Further, the work revealed that Chinese citizens’ understanding of information ecosystems plays an important role in their attitudes towards censorship and official media, and their evaluation of both domestic and international information during the global crisis.