Anonymity, privacy, and online risk/safety
How do anonymous and pseudonymous infrastructures change disclosure, trust, misinformation, social support, and user sustainability across dark-web and surface-web communities?
Zhicong CHEN
I employ computational social science approaches to examine how and why communication infrastructures (re)shape
knowledge, culture, and risks
across digital platforms and emerging technologies, through a longitudinal and historical perspective.
I currently work as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the
Department of Communications and New Media (CNM)
at the
National University of Singapore (NUS).
Before joining NUS, I served as an Assistant Professor at School of Journalism and Communication, Nanjing
University (2022-2025).
I earned my Ph.D. in Communication from
Department of Media and Communication (COM),
City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK)
in 2022, where I received rigorous and interdisplinary training at the
Web Mining Lab
, a pioneering research hub founded and led by
Prof. Jonathan J. H. Zhu
(ICA Fellow, 2018) , and a key role in establishing the field of computational communication research across the region since 2016.
(ICA Fellow, 2018) , and a key role in establishing the field of computational communication research across the region since 2016.
Communication scientist with a computational foundation
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Ph.D., Communication, 2022 City University of Hong Kong RGC Hong Kong PhD Fellowship (2018/19)
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M.A., Communication, 2018 Nanjing University
-
B.Eng., Software Engineering, 2016 Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications
01 / Research interests
Research interests shaped by a common concern with communication infrastructure.
My work connects communication theory with computational methods to investigate how infrastructures enable participation, constrain visibility, reorganize social relationships, and shape collective understandings over time.
Platforms, behavior, and digital risk and resilience
How do platform architectures and communication environments influence behavior, emotion, exposure, deception, and public sense-making in political and health contexts?
Cultural change through text as data
How can multilingual and diachronic corpora reveal long-term shifts in cultural values, geopolitical narratives, ideology, and the meanings attached to social categories?
Computational Methods
- Natural language processing
- Network and cascade analysis
- Machine learning
- Survival and panel models
- Big data analytics
- Multilevel analysis
02 / publications
Research across platforms, histories, and cultures.
A selection of publications that represents the central empirical and methodological threads of my research programme. (* corresponding author; † equal contribution)
First-authored
012026
Framing the world: Strategic narratives of foreign states in China’s mainstream media (1950–2019)
PLOS ONE ↗
022026
Tales of twin forums on the dark and surface web: Social interactions and user sustainability in anonymous online communities
EPJ Data Science ↗
032026
The dark side of the Internet: Fueling misinformation in the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 US Presidential Election
Communication and the Public ↗
042025
Who weaved my behavior cocoon? The impact of ICT use on daily behaviors in an accelerated society
Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research ↗
052024
Seeking anonymity on the Internet: The knowledge accumulation process and global usage of the Tor network
New Media & Society ↗
062023
The dark web privacy dilemma: Linguistic diversity, talkativeness, and user engagement on the cryptomarket forums
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications ↗
Corresponding-authored
072026
From words to harm: Hate speech and societal violence in US presidential campaigns
International Journal of Communication ↗
082025
Exploring the mediating role of selective exposure to partisan media between the authoritarian personality and gun control attitudes
Journal of Information Technology & Politics ↗
092025
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair: The role of emotion, panic, and sympathy discourses in promoting productive actions
International Journal of Business Communication ↗
102024
Propagating COVID-19 conspiracy theories: The influence of right-wing sources
Sage Open ↗
112024
Globalization in international tensions: The impact of military conflicts on cultural orientations of multinational corporations’ advertising in modern China (1932–1937)
Chinese Journal of Communication ↗
Co-authored
122026
Beyond socioeconomic status: Divergent post-flood mobility patterns in South and Southeast Asian cities using mobile phone data
Communications Earth & Environment ↗
132025
Geopolitics in language: A psychological view of Sino-Japanese relations over time
Journal of Social Issues ↗
142022
Toward a better understanding of cultural change: Reply to Bao et al. (2022)
American Psychologist ↗
152021
Individualism with Chinese characteristics? Discerning cultural shifts in China using 50 years of printed texts
American Psychologist ↗
03 / Teaching
Teaching people to reason with data and work with AI.
My courses combine computational practice, substantive communication questions, critical interpretation, research ethics, and reproducible workflows.
Computation becomes meaningful when students question its assumptions.
I design courses that move from code comprehension to analytical judgment: students learn how data are produced, how models encode choices, how evidence should be communicated, and where computational conclusions can fail.
Teaching philosophy
- Lowering barriers without lowering standards. Many students write their first line of code in my class. Live coding, annotated notebooks, templates, and small-group troubleshooting build confidence, while optional extensions stretch advanced learners.
- Every measurement is an argument. Each metric must be tied to a human validation process and defended against alternative explanations. An engagement count may signal attention, endorsement, or outrage; a network tie may signal agreement, opposition, or surveillance.
- Context shapes the interpretations of data. Platform, language, population, and period shape what a finding means and where it travels. Students ask who is missing from their data and whether a conclusion would hold elsewhere, especially when tools built on English-language data meet other languages.
- Knowing, learning from AI, and going beyond it. Students first sketch an analysis on their own, then ask an AI assistant to attempt the same task, and compare the two: what the AI did better, what it missed, and what only they can judge.
2027NUS · Undergraduate · Co-instructor
Introduction to Visual Cultural Analytics
Mixed-method visual research with content analysis, machine learning, image features, clustering, and AI-assisted annotation.
2026NUS · Graduate · Instructor
Coding for Communicators
R programming, data wrangling, visualization, modeling, web data, reproducible reporting, and responsible interpretation.
2025NUS · Graduate · Instructor
Introduction to Applied Social Media Analytics
Social media data collection, text and network analysis, visualization, and ethical analytics with Python.
2025NJU · Undergraduate · Instructor
Data Visualization
Principles and practice of visual analysis, statistical graphics, interactive communication, and the critical evaluation of data-driven claims.
2024–2025NJU · Graduate · Instructor
Text as Data
Computational text analysis covering corpus construction, preprocessing, representation, supervised and unsupervised methods, and substantive interpretation.
2023–2024NJU · Undergraduate · Instructor
Data Journalism
Data acquisition, cleaning, analysis, visualization, and narrative design for evidence-based journalism and public communication.
2023NJU · Undergraduate · Instructor
Introduction to Python
Programming fundamentals, structured data, web data collection, text processing, automation, and reproducible research workflows.
2019CityU · Graduate · Teaching Assistant
Media Data Analytics
Media data analysis and visualization across numeric, text, and visual data, with computational methods and predictive modeling.
04 / Academic service
Contributing to the communities that make scholarship possible.
My service spans peer review, conference evaluation, student supervision, research mentoring, thesis assessment, and scholarly knowledge exchange.
Journal reviewing
Reviewer for journals including New Media & Society, Asian Journal of Communication, Chinese Journal of Communication, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, International Journal of Information Security, Journal of Computational Social Science, and Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.
Conference communities
- International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2)
- International Communication Association
- International Association for Media and Communication Research
- Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
Supervision and mentorship
Undergraduate thesis supervision and research mentoring across degree levels, including students who progressed to postgraduate study at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, UC Davis, UT Austin, and Michigan State University.
Assessment and scholarly exchange
Participation in master’s and doctoral thesis committees, invited talks and guest lectures, computational workshops, and interdisciplinary research communities in communication and computational social science.
Contact