When “Fake News” Becomes Real: The Consequences of False Government Denials in an Authoritarian Country

• Published date: 01 April 2021
• Date: 01 April 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0010414020957672
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414020957672

Comparative Political Studies

2021, Vol. 54(5) 753 –778

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414020957672

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Article

When “Fake News”

Becomes Real: The

Consequences of False

Government Denials in

an Authoritarian Country

Chengli Wang1 and Haifeng Huang2

Abstract

Governments around the world, particularly authoritarian ones, often deny

inconvenient or unfavorable information, calling it fake news or false rumor,

and yet what was denied often turns out to be true eventually. How will

citizens react when the initial “fake news” is verified to be real? What are

the consequences of false government denials on government credibility

and citizen satisfaction? Using a survey experiment in China and a follow-up

survey, we find that citizens can be persuaded by the authorities’ denials

and reduce their belief in a piece of news that has been declared “fake.”

But when the denied news turns out to be real, citizens will reduce their

belief not only in the denial at hand but also in a similar denial in the future

and reduce their satisfaction with the government. Thus, false denials have

both immediate and lasting effects on government credibility and can erode

citizen satisfaction with the government.

Keywords

rumor, denial, policy instability, authoritarian politics, fake news

1Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, China

2University of California at Merced, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Haifeng Huang, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California at Merced,

5200 N Lake Road, Merced, CA 95343, USA.

Email: hhuang24@ucmerced.edu

957672CPSXXX10.1177/0010414020957672Comparative Political StudiesWang and Huang

research-article2020

754 Comparative Political Studies 54(5)

Introduction

Governments around the world, particularly authoritarian ones, often deny

unfavorable news or inconvenient information, calling it fake news or false

rumor, and yet what was denied often turns out to be true eventually. For

instance, when Dr. Li Wenliang warned of a SARS-like disease in the early

stage of the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak, he, along with several other

doctors in China, was reprimanded by the authorities for rumor-mongering

(New York Times, 2020). A few months later, amid the global pandemic, he

was officially recognized as a martyr (Su, 2020). For another example, in

February 2012, when Wang Lijun, a top aide to a member of the Chinese

Communist Party’s Political Bureau who was at the time contending for

China’s top leadership position, defected to a US Consulate and was then

taken away by China’s state security personnel, the municipal government

where Mr. Wang held his position as a vice mayor denied intense internet

discussions about his whereabouts and stated instead that Mr. Wang was

simply undergoing a “vacation-style treatment” for health reasons (Branigan,

2012). The statement made “vacation-style treatment” an instant hit meme

on the Chinese internet (Chin & Spegele, 2012).

This phenomenon also exists in democracies. US President Donald Trump,

for example, is well known for frequently branding unfavorable media reports

as “fake news,” but those reports are often validated later (Farhi, 2019;

Rogers, 2019). His popularization of the term, in fact, has led leaders around

the world, including those from Hungary, Poland, Russia, Syria, and

Venezuela, to follow suit and similarly attack inconvenient information and

media scrutiny as fake news (Erlanger, 2017; Gabbatt, 2018).

How will citizens react when a piece of “fake news” is demonstrated to

be real? What are the consequences of false government denials on govern-

ment credibility and citizen satisfaction with the government? A rapidly

growing literature has examined the psychological foundations of belief in

rumor, fake news, and misinformation1 (Flynn et al., 2017; Pennycook &

Rand, 2019), their spread through the internet and social media (Grinberg

et al., 2019; Guess et al., 2019; Vosoughi et al., 2018), their political and

social impacts in various contexts (Fine & Ellis, 2010; Fine & Turner, 2001;

Huang, 2017), and strategies for and effectiveness of correcting misinfor-

mation (Aird et al., 2018; Berinsky, 2017; Clayton et al., 2020). Very little

work, however, has explored what will happen if an initial piece of “fake

news” is later proven be real and the authorities’ denial turns out to be fake.

We build on Huang’s (2017) analysis of the effects of rumors and rebuttals

in an authoritarian setting to address these very questions about false

denials.