Break the Breaking News: How Government Utilizes Political Rumors to Prepare Public Anticipation in China

Abstract

Rumors have threatened authoritarian regimes, which often quell them in “reactive” ways such as censorship and rebuttal. However, we argue that authoritarian governments also “proactively” manipulate political rumors to serve their political interests. They may insinuate news of high-level political changes through rumors to prepare public opinion and avoid the social turmoil that could have resulted from abrupt announcements. Using trend analysis and automated text analysis upon the big data analytics platforms, we find that the Chinese government stimulated and indulged the propagation of rumors about the upcoming crackdown of national-level officials during anticorruption campaigns, which helped the general public anticipate the downfall of these leaders. We show how government innuendo guided the discourse of online rumors by visually displaying the overlapped timing and bursts of mass concern about those leaders and their arrested family members. This study uncovers a hidden opinion guiding strategy involving informal information in authoritarian politics.