Social bots have already infiltrated social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and so on. Exploring the role of social bots in discussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as comparing the behavioral differences between social bots and humans, is an important foundation for studying public health opinion dissemination. We collected data on Twitter and used Botometer to classify users into social bots and humans. Machine learning methods were used to analyze the characteristics of topic semantics, sentiment attributes, dissemination intentions, and interaction patterns of humans and social bots. The results show that 22% of these accounts were social bots, while 78% were humans, and there are significant differences in the behavioral characteristics between them. Social bots are more concerned with the topics of public health news than humans are with individual health and daily lives. More than 85% of bots’ tweets are liked, and they have a large number of followers and friends, which means they have influence on internet users’ perceptions about disease transmission and public health. In addition, social bots, located mainly in Europe and America countries, create an “authoritative” image by posting a lot of news, which in turn gains more attention and has a significant effect on humans. The findings contribute to understanding the behavioral patterns of new technologies such as social bots and their role in the dissemination of public health information.

In the age of social media, rumor dissemination brings serious negative impacts to society. It is important to explore the dissemination mechanism and management strategies to control rumor dissemination and reduce negative impacts. Considering the effect of reverse-conformity ambivalent psychology on the rumor dissemination process, a novel dynamic model incorporating the dual psychology effects is constructed. Then, we perform the calculation of basic reproduction number and stability. Besides, we conduct model parameter fitting and compare with other models to verify the validity of the model. Further, we explore the rumor dissemination law through numerical simulation. The results show that the increase of reverse psychology and refute-exposed individuals' internal dissemination preferences with conformity psychology could weaken the scope and speed of rumor information dissemination, and strengthen that of rumor-refuting information dissemination. The increase of rumor-exposed individuals' internal dissemination preferences with conformity psychology would bring the opposite result. The government should actively share knowledge, cultivate individuals' awareness of rumor-refuting and respond promptly against rumor information in a timely manner. The results are useful to understand better the effect of reverse-conformity ambivalent psychology on rumor dissemination and suggest a promising way to weaken the negative impacts of rumor.

The global outbreak of COVID-19 has been wreaking havoc on all aspects of human societies. In addition to pharmaceutical interventions, non-pharmaceutical intervention policies have been proven to be crucial in slowing down the spread of the virus and reducing the impact of the outbreak on economic development, daily life, and social stability. However, no studies have focused on which non-pharmaceutical intervention policies are more effective; this is the focus of our study. We used data samples from 102 countries and regions around the world and selected seven categories of related policies, including work and school suspensions, assembly restrictions, movement restrictions, home isolation, international population movement restrictions, income subsidies, and testing and screening as the condition variables. A susceptible-exposed-infected-quarantined-recovered (SEIQR) model considering non-pharmaceutical intervention policies and latency with infectiousness was constructed to calculate the epidemic transmission rate as the outcome variable, and a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method was applied to explore the multiple concurrent causal relationships and multiple governance paths of non-pharmaceutical intervention policies for epidemics from the configuration perspective. We found a total of four non-pharmaceutical intervention policy pathways. Among them, L1 was highly suppressive, L2 was moderately suppressive, and L3 was externally suppressive. The results also showed that individual non-pharmaceutical intervention policy could not effectively suppress the spread of the pandemic. Moreover, three specific non-pharmaceutical intervention policies, including work stoppage and school closure, testing and screening, and economic subsidies, had a universal effect in the policies grouping for effective control of the pandemic transmission.

In the age of social media, rumor dissemination brings serious negative impacts to society. It is important to explore the dissemination mechanism and management strategies to control rumor dissemination and reduce negative impacts. Considering the effect of reverse‐conformity ambivalent psychology on the rumor dissemination process, a novel dynamic model incorporating the dual psychology effects is constructed. Then, we perform the calculation of basic reproduction number and stability. Besides, we conduct model parameter fitting and compare with other models to verify the validity of the model. Furthermore, we explore the rumor dissemination law through numerical simulation. The results show that the increase of reverse psychology and refute‐exposed individuals’ internal dissemination preferences with conformity psychology could weaken the scope and speed of rumor information dissemination and strengthen that of rumor‐refuting information dissemination. The increase of rumor‐exposed individuals’ internal dissemination preferences with conformity psychology would bring the opposite result. The government should actively share knowledge, cultivate individuals’ awareness of rumor‐refuting, and respond promptly against rumor information in a timely manner. The results are useful to understand better the effect of reverse‐conformity ambivalent psychology on rumor dissemination and suggest a promising way to weaken the negative impacts of rumor.