Zhicong Chen
(Teaching & Research)
Block AS6
11 Computing Drive
National University
of Singapore
Kent Ridge Campus
Singapore
117416
I study how digital environments (particularly with low accountability) shape community dynamics, user behavior, and information ecosystems.
My research spans contexts from the Dark Web and the Tor networks to anonymous and pseudonymous platforms, as well as emerging media technologies such as generative AI. Across these contexts, I examine issues of platform governance and information dynamics, with a particular focus on the online communication processes of health, political, and risk information.
Methodologically, I use computational methods such as network analysis and natural language processing to investigate digital traces and large-scale online archives. Beyond studying contemporary platforms, I develop cultural analytics pipelines that apply large-scale diachronic text mining to trace long-term shifts in public discourses across multilingual corpora.
My recent work expands into human-centered online safety, examining how people disclose sensitive information, seek social support, and experience fraud and deception when engaging with emerging media platforms, particularly within rapidly evolving AI-driven environments. My work has appeared in New Media & Society, American Psychologist, EPJ Data Science, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Nature Portfolio), and a range of international peer-reviewed publications.
Prior to joining NUS, I was an Assistant Professor at Nanjing University from 2022 to 2025. I earned my Ph.D. from City University of Hong Kong in 2022, where I was advised by Prof. Xiaofan Liu and Prof. Jonathan J. H. Zhu at the Web Mining Laboratory. Before that, I received a master’s degree from Nanjing University in 2018 and a B.Eng. in Software Engineering from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2016.
