How Do Rumors Orient People to the Truth?

Abstract

How does the general public address information deficits caused by rigid control of information in authoritarian regimes? We argue that the public can compensate for such deficits not only through an externally-oriented approach, such as using a virtual private network to access outside information sources, but also with an internally-oriented approach by gleaning extra information from official messages domestically. We delineate the circumstances of internally-oriented information compensation using the case of China. We conduct trend and text analysis upon the data of millions of individual-level actions of Chinese Internet search engines and social media users during a large-scale anticorruption campaign that conspicuously claimed to crack down on influential high-level corrupt leaders without naming who exactly. We show that many Chinese netizens, through heuristic reasoning, were able to identify the unnamed high-ranking officials targeted by the campaign based on negative official reports about their family members. A portion of the netizens even correctly predicted the downfall of the leaders months before government announcements. There were also a sizable number of netizens skeptical about the government’s intention behind those official reports and who were critical about the regime in general. Our findings show that many citizens are actually politically sophisticated and unsatisfied with the government’s information control, which inadvertently motivates people’s information self-salvation and may result in a chaotic information environment not necessarily favoring authoritarian regimes.