Rumors spread on social media overshadow the truth and trigger public panic. One effective countermeasure to address this issue is online rumor-combating. However, its effectiveness on social media has not been fully verified. In this study, drawing on construal level theory, we use temporal distance—the time interval between a rumor-combating post being released and receiving responses from social media users—to measure the effectiveness of rumor-combating. We also adopt elaboration likelihood model to explore the factors that could enhance this effectiveness. The empirical results show that perceptible (central route) factors, including the author’s authoritative combating methods, media richness, and positive emotions, are negatively related to temporal distance and are more effective for enhancing rumor-combating effectiveness than imperceptible (peripheral route) factors, such as the author’s influence and activeness. In addition, media richness exerts positive moderating effects on the relationship between perceptible route factors and rumor-combating effectiveness, implying that with the help of images or videos, rumor-combating effectiveness improves. This study addresses the need to enhance the effectiveness of rumor-combating and has practical implications for combating rumors in the social media.

中文翻译：

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所见即所得：基于阐述似然模型的社交媒体上增强谣言打击效果


社交媒体上传播的谣言掩盖了真相，引发了公众的恐慌。解决这个问题的一种有效对策是打击在线谣言。然而，它在社交媒体上的有效性尚未得到充分验证。在这项研究中，借鉴解释层面理论，我们使用时间距离——从发布反谣帖子到收到社交媒体用户回复之间的时间间隔——来衡量反谣的有效性。我们还采用细化似然模型来探索可以提高这种有效性的因素。实证结果表明，可感知的 （中心路线） 因素，包括作者的权威打击方法、媒体丰富度和积极情绪，与时间距离呈负相关，比作者的影响力和活跃度等难以察觉的 （外围路线） 因素更有效地增强谣言打击效果。此外，媒体丰富度对可感知路径因子与造谣效果之间的关系起到正向调节作用，这意味着在图片或视频的帮助下，防谣效果得到提高。本研究解决了提高打击谣言有效性的需求，并对打击社交媒体中的谣言具有实际意义。