Fake news have pervaded the social media landscape during the COVID-19 outbreak. To further explore what contributed to fake news susceptibility of social media users, the research 1) integrated a widely-adopted mass communication theory of third-person perception (TPP) with digital disinformation; 2) examined users’ social media engagement and individual characteristics toward risk as antecedents of TPP; and lastly, 3) tested TPP of fake news under a context of COVID-19 outbreak, an uncertain situation flooded with baseless news and information. An online survey was conducted on 871 respondents via Amazon Mechanical Turk. As a result, we found that in the context of COVID-19, social media engagement 1) directly increased TPP; and 2) indirectly increased TPP via self-efficacy and perceived knowledge. However, negative affect failed to mediate a positive relationship between communal engagement and TPP, as the respondents rated themselves more attentive to fake news than are others. Therefore, the fact that social media directly and indirectly provoked higher TPP implicates that a potential harm of social media is not confined to a rumor mill that propagates false stories, as widely recognized, but can further extend to an echo chamber to cultivate a slanted belief that he or she is fake-news-proof.

在 COVID-19 爆发期间，假新闻充斥着社交媒体。为了进一步探索是什么导致了社交媒体用户对假新闻的敏感性，该研究 1) 将广泛采用的第三人称感知 (TPP) 大众传播理论与数字虚假信息相结合；2) 检查用户的社交媒体参与度和个人风险特征作为 TPP 的前因；最后，3) 在 COVID-19 爆发的背景下测试假新闻的 TPP，这是一种充斥着毫无根据的新闻和信息的不确定情况。通过 Amazon Mechanical Turk 对 871 名受访者进行了在线调查。结果，我们发现在 COVID-19 的背景下，社交媒体参与 1) 直接增加了 TPP；2) 通过自我效能感和感知知识间接增加了 TPP。然而，负面影响未能调解社区参与与 TPP 之间的积极关系，因为受访者认为自己比其他人更关注假新闻。因此，社交媒体直接和间接引发更高TPP这一事实暗示，社交媒体的潜在危害并不局限于广为人知的传播虚假故事的谣言工厂，而是可以进一步扩展到回声室以培养倾斜的信念他或她是防假新闻的。