Rumors permeate every corner of the Chinese Internet, even though some of them have been repeatedly shown to be false.
A recent report released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed that 70 percent of interviewees said they tend to believe online rumors, instead of ignoring them.
Experts said online rumors are like tough organisms that can evolve in order to spread in different environments.
Water devils and swine flu
"Liu Xu, a 26-year-old villager in Heze, East China's Shandong Province died of the H7N9 virus from eating cherries. Stay away from cherries, mangos and bananas, which have been contaminated by parasites, and share this with people you care about," read a WeChat post that went viral among the residents of Heze at the end of May, people.cn reported.
On May 30, local police investigated to the post to prove it was false, and detained two suspects who police say originally spread the rumor.
According to Heze police, 14 locals have been detained for spreading online rumors in 2016.
However, rather than ending there, the rumor continued to spread. In the days after the detentions the rumor kept being shared on Sina Weibo with "Heze" changed to the name of different cities all over China.
Actually, the "cherry and H7N9" rumor was a mutation of the previous "pork and H7N9" rumor and "fish and SB250" rumor, according to "Rumor Filter," a WeChat account dedicated to refuting online rumors.
"Rumors are like living bodies that can evolve in order to adapt to different environments," said He Lingnan, deputy chief of the big data and communication lab under Sun Yat-sen University.
According to a recent "Rumor Filter" report, 36 percent of rumors are fake news reports, with 21 percent talking about scientific common sense, 13 percent about food safety and 10 percent about personal safety.
"We cannot judge if a post is a rumor or not through deciding if it is true or false, because most of events have uncertainties," He said.
According to He, rumors are usually dramatic stories with shocking details that claim there will be severe consequences, and closely follow current affairs.
"Rumor-makers use shocking titles to attract readers, but the rumors are always about something that hidden," Qin An, director of China Institute for Cyberspace Strategy, told the Global Times.
"A lot of fake stories were forwarded by people in my WeChat circles, such as claims that willow catkins are actually pests," Helene Zhang, a 20-year-old Beijing resident, told the Global Times.
"Once my mum showed me a viral picture of a 'water ghost,' which I knew was a hairless sloth," Zhang said, joking that her parents should watch more animal documentaries.
"I have told my mum to stop forwarding such stories thousands of times, but she just ignores me," a 22-year-old Shanghai resident surnamed Sun told the Global Times.
According to a research released by Journalism and Communication Research Institute under CASS on Tuesday, 60 percent of interviewees said they mostly see rumors on WeChat.
"Seventy percent people said they 'would rather believe the rumors,' which is the attitude that has fostered the spread of rumors," the report said, adding that many interviewees said that seniors are particularly likely to believe rumors.
"Facing a mass of information, netizens, especially seniors, often do not know which course to take," Qin said.
"People should check on rumors by searching for them online and seeing if the origins of the rumors are authoritative," He said.
Big data
"In terms of safety, some rumors may try to look official to mislead users into filling in private information or downloading viruses, in order to scam them," Wang Biao, a security expert from wooyun.org, a platform that brings common security problems to the attention of website owners.
"A rumor could be created with or without a purpose," Qin noted, "and the purposes might be linked to business, personal or political benefits, so rumors would not only damage the involved party's practical interests, but also his reputation internationally."
According to Qin, big data and automatization can be taken advantage of to help control rumors in a more efficient way, and an opener and faster channel that provides accurate information is also needed.
"Online rumors cannot be eliminated completely, however the government should keep a reasonable attitude toward them and decrease uncertainty, so that the masses would not be panicked easily," He said.
