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?
Welcome!
I study how communication infrastructures (re)shape knowledge, culture, and risk across digital platforms, anonymous communities, and large-scale historical corpora using computational methods.
Zhicong Chen
Computational social scientist
digital media scholar
digital media scholar
01 / About
Communication scientist with a computational foundation.
I am a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow in the
Department of Communications and New Media (CNM)
at the
National University of Singapore (NUS).
Before joining NUS, I worked as an Assistant Professor at School of Journalism and Communication, Nanjing University.
I received my Ph.D. in Media and Communication from City University of Hong Kong (2022), where I was affiliated with the Web Mining Lab , under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan J. H. Zhu and Prof. Xiaofan Liu.
Before joining NUS, I worked as an Assistant Professor at School of Journalism and Communication, Nanjing University.
I received my Ph.D. in Media and Communication from City University of Hong Kong (2022), where I was affiliated with the Web Mining Lab , under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan J. H. Zhu and Prof. Xiaofan Liu.
-
Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow Department of Communications and New Media
National University of Singapore -
Assistant Professor School of Journalism and Communication
Nanjing University -
Ph.D., Media and Communication Department of Media and Communication
City University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong PhD Fellowship -
M.A., Journalism and Communication School of Journalism and Communication
Nanjing University
Outstanding Graduate -
B.Eng., Software Engineering School of Computer Science
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Outstanding Graduate
02 / 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?
Methods & infrastructure
- Natural language processing
- Network and cascade analysis
- Diachronic word embeddings
- Survival and panel models
- Cross-platform data pipelines
- Large-scale web scraping
- Multilingual corpus analysis
- Reproducible Python and R workflows
03 / Featured publications
Research across platforms, histories, and cultures.
A selection of publications that represents the central empirical and methodological threads of my research programme.
2026
Framing the world: Strategic narratives of foreign states in
China’s mainstream media (1950–2019)
PLOS ONE ↗
2025
Tales of Twin Forums on the Dark and Surface Web: Social
Interactions and User Sustainability in Anonymous Online
Communities
EPJ Data Science ↗
2025
Geopolitics in Language: A Psychological View of Sino‐Japanese
Relations Over Time
Journal of Social Issues ↗
2025
Who weaved my behavior cocoon? The impact of digital media use
on daily behaviors in an accelerated society
Communications ↗
2025
Exploring the mediating role of exposure to partisan media
between the authoritarian personality and gun control
attitudes
Journal of Information Technology & Politics ↗
2025
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 ↗
2025
The dark side of the Internet: Fueling misinformation in the
COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 US Presidential Election
Communication and the Public ↗
2024
Globalization in international tensions: The impact of
military conflicts on the cultural orientations of
multinational corporations’ advertising in modern China
(1932–1937)
Chinese Journal of Communication ↗
2024
Seeking anonymity on the Internet: The knowledge accumulation
process and global usage of the Tor network
New Media & Society ↗
2023
The Dark Web Privacy Dilemma: Linguistic Diversity,
Talkativeness, and User Engagement on the Cryptomarket
Forums
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications ↗
2021
Individualism with Chinese characteristics? Discerning
cultural shifts in China using 50 years of printed texts
American Psychologist ↗
04 / Teaching
Teaching people to reason with data, not merely operate tools.
My courses combine computational practice, substantive communication questions, critical interpretation, research ethics, and reproducible workflows.
Teaching philosophy
Computation becomes meaningful when students can 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.
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
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.
05 / 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, 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