In the network age, everyone can become an information communicator. There is a vivid metaphor that everyone has a microphone in front of them, so people call this era "the era of mass microphones". In the era of We Media, some media, driven by interests, have become "disaster areas" where rumors are bred and spread, with the main purpose of attracting fans and increasing attention rate, and the main means of "new speculation of old rumors" and "transplanting". A large number of text analysis shows that rumors about the quality and safety of agricultural products often have the following characteristics in content:
First, labeling. Rumors generally bear the labels of "cancer", "toxic", "hormone", "infertility", etc., and use "good advice", "kneel down and forward", "CCTV exposure", "emergency notice", "emergency diffusion" and other good intentions to attract the attention of netizens with extremely exaggerated words. In the article title, rumormongers not only use punctuation marks such as exclamation marks, question marks and ellipses to win the attention of the audience, but also use a large amount of character space to attract the attention of readers. In the text, I like to use the titles of doctors, experts in traditional Chinese medicine, media and other authoritative institutions and experts, trying to demonstrate with extreme words such as "professional", "authoritative" and "100%".
The second is emotional. In order to expand the spread area and influence, rumors about the quality and safety of agricultural products often use a series of text operations, such as adding details and using highly infectious words to enhance the emotional proximity between the text and the audience. For example, the elderly, children, students, rural women and pregnant women are selected as the main body of the text, and they are willing to join the shocking background story "Empathy". However, in the body of the text, the description of the harmful facts by such rumors is often vague, and cannot provide direct causal evidence.
The third is visualization. The rumormongers comprehensively use multimedia technology to trigger users' forwarding behavior in the form of pictures, texts and videos. From the pictures in the rumors of "plastic rice" to the rumors of "contraceptive grapes", the rumors of agricultural product quality and safety tend to use visual elements to make themselves look more "real". In particular, the video rumor, with its flowing pictures, has a stronger sense of the scene and is extremely difficult to refute rumors. Under the visual impact, the psychological hint of "seeing is believing" will weaken the rational spirit of most netizens, and reduce their immunity to such "seeing is not necessarily believing" video rumors.
Fourth, periodization. Due to the restriction of the main body, the rumor about the quality and safety of agricultural products shows obvious cyclical characteristics. The data shows that January and December of each year are the trough of rumors about the quality and safety of agricultural products; May and June are the active periods of this kind of public opinion, especially in the time when relevant agricultural products are listed in a centralized way. Rumors follow closely. In the spring and summer of 2018, there were many rumors about the quality and safety of agricultural products, such as "eating strawberries is easy to infect Norovirus", "drinking tea is equal to drinking poison" and so on.
The fifth is commercialization. Relevant statistics show that 79% of agricultural product quality and safety rumors contain advertising content. Rumors about what agricultural products are going to be marketed, about what is good, and about what the public likes to eat, create "nausea" to attract onlookers and advertise. Most of the rumor advertisements are hard advertisements, which are mainly slogans and appeals, with single means of expression and strong awareness of publicity. Some of them deliberately exaggerate the function and effect of their products in the form of advertising soft text in order to promote their products, and make false publicity to obtain commercial benefits. (Deng Yu)
