Fei Shen

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Verified

Fei verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Professor (Full) at City University of Hong Kong

The oft-quoted John Dewey line ‘‘[d]emocracy begins in conversation’’ (Lamont,1959,p.58) highlights the political implication of free and vibrant discussions inmodern societies. Political discussion and conversation could enhance public opinion,which in turn influences political actors and their policies (Stromer-Galley W Schneider, 1996), and the...

This study examines public demand for Internet freedom and control along with their microindividual and macrosocietal predictors. Based on a secondary analysis of the Internet Society’s Global Internet User Survey data, it is found that the picture regarding people’s attitudes toward Internet freedom and censorship is more complicated and nuanced t...

This study aims to disentangle the empirical relationships between Asian values and attitudes toward freedom of expression in Asia. Findings from our multinational survey suggest no obvious relationship between Asian values and support for freedom of expression at the country level. At the individual level, the data suggest a positive relationship...

Existing empirical research has rarely examined the influence of Internet use on civic participation through the lens of consumer behavior. In this study, we propose a consumer empowerment model to explore the relationship between Internet use and civic participation mediated by consumer behavior variables including online shopping and consumer com...

How political violence emerges, why people support it, and how authorities can address it without escalating further radicalization remain an ongoing debate. In this study, we develop a quantitative model to predict violence endorsement as a function of repression severity, group identification, and individual emotions. We situate our investigation...

Purpose Existing research has shown the role of social media in facilitating general protest participation. However, there is a noticeable gap in understanding the dynamics related to explicitly unlawful behaviors during protests, which have become increasingly prominent in recent times. Drawing upon the communication mediation model (O-S-O-R model...

Background This study explores and compares the influences of family communication patterns (conversation orientation and conformity orientation) on family discussion and preventive behaviors for older parents and their adult children in the context of the early COVID-19 outbreak. Methods A total of 248 participants, including 117 parents and 131...

Given the widespread misinformation problem in societies across the globe, scholars aiming to combat misinformation wish to change verification behaviors at the individual level. To map what is known about media users’ verification behaviors, this study reviewed 52 articles and analyzed how verification research has progressed so far. The results i...

This study proposes a moderated mediation model to understand how social media use influences political polarization through two competing mechanisms and how such mechanisms are conditioned by political tolerance. The model was tested with a survey of 1,200 Hong Kong residents after the prolonged Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement. We fou...

In this study, we examined online conversations on Twitter about the Russia-Ukraine War and investigated differences between bots and non-bots accounts. Using ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’ as keywords, we employed a Twitter API to collect data from 17 February to 18 March on Twitter. We obtained a large dataset of over 3.7 million tweets generated by abou...

Background: Countries across the globe have released many COVID-19 mobile apps. However, there is a lack of systematic empirical investigation into the factors affecting the adoption and evaluation of COVID-related apps. This study explores what factors at the country level and the app levels would influence the adoption and evaluation of COVID-19...

Contemporary Hong Kong is riven by serious political and social polarization. Hong Kong's problem does not lie in ideological differences among citizens; rather, the major issue is that people of different political stripes view each other as enemies. In this study, we conducted two experiments to compare the impacts of deliberation and discussion...

People rely on heuristic cues to evaluate messages. An increasing number of studies found corrective messages useful in correcting misinformation, and the correction effect varies on heuristic cues. Existing studies, however, mostly focus on correction effects in the Western context. This study aims to compare the effects of corrective messages wit...

Information disclosure during online political activities can place participants under the threat of personal data leakage and misuse, but privacy protection in the context of online political participation has rarely been studied. This study examined how online political participation is related to privacy protection behaviours. Using survey data...

Network size has a fundamental influence on other network properties. As studies of social network size have accumulated beyond the U.S. and Western Europe, diversity in the networks examined and methods used to construct size estimates have hindered the ability to make direct cross-national comparisons. We employ data from a summary political disc...

Text mining has been a dominant approach to extracting useful information from massive unstructured data online. But existing tools for Chinese word segmentation are not ideal for processing social media text data in Cantonese. This project developed CyberCan (https://github.com/shenfei1010/CyberCan), a lexicon of contemporary Cantonese based on mo...

This report presents a part of the findings from the Hong Kong Online Public Opinion Data Mining Project (http://www.webopinion.hk/) that aims to collect and analyze online public opinion towards different issues and topics in Hong Kong. The report provides an overview of public opinion on a variety of topics such as public figures, organizations,...

This report presents a part of the findings from the Hong Kong Online Public Opinion Data Mining Project (http://www.webopinion.hk/) that aims to collect and analyze online public opinion towards different issues and topics in Hong Kong. The report provides an overview of public opinion on a variety of topics such as public figures, organizations,...

The Hong Kong Online Public Opinion Data Mining Project (http://www.webopinion.hk/) aims to collect and study online public opinion in Hong Kong. Funded by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (Project No. 11600717), this project started in January 2018 and is currently housed in the Department of Media and Communication at City University of H...

Objectives Promoting health knowledge during a public health crisis is essential. This study aims to examine how fact-checking habit influences COVID-19 knowledge in the COVID-19 infodemic. Study Design This study uses a cross-sectional survey. Methods During the early outbreak of COVID-19 in China, we conducted an online survey and collected dat...

Abstract Background The global outbreak of COVID-19 has become an international public health crisis. Specific antiviral treatments for COVID-19 are not yet available, and prevention is of particular importance to fight the virus. This study tends to explore and compare the roles of cognitive and affective factors in predicting preventive behavior...

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of traditional media, social media, and media trust on people's compliance with health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic in China. A total of 3000 Chinese adults filled online questionnaire using quota sampling method. Results show that use of central government media and use of WeChat are po...

Fernbach et al. (2019) found that extreme opposition to genetically modified (GM) food was associated with low levels of objective knowledge and high levels of self-assessed knowledge in the US. They also found that the pattern that extreme opponents knew the least but felt they knew the most applied to opponents of a medical application of genetic...

Misinformation continues to influence inferences even after being discredited, making it extremely difficult to completely erase its detrimental effects. With a two-wave online experiment, this research tested how the effectiveness of misinformation correction is influenced by (1) whether correction is presented before or after misinformation and (...

Background: The global outbreak of COVID-19 has become an international public health crisis. Specific antiviral treatments for COVID-19 are not yet available, and prevention is of particular importance to fighting the virus. This study tends to explore and compare the roles of cognitive and affective factors in predicting preventive behavior adopt...

Government trust is known to be associated with preventive practices during pandemics, but few studies have explored the roles of knowledge and negative emotion in conditioning the relationship between trust and preventive behaviors. The aim of this study was to explore the roles of knowledge and negative emotion in conditioning the relationship be...

Requesting Internet platform providers to remove content is one of the common approaches for government worldwide to regulate online incivility. This study investigates the driving forces behind the variation in the number of uncivil content removal requests across countries. By connecting data from the 2017 Google transparency report to a host of...

The development of information technology not only allows people to contact government more easily, but also provides researchers with new opportunities to investigate the pattern of interaction between citizens and government. Using data spanning eight years from a Chinese nationwide political forum, we examined how citizens’ government contacting...

Public opinion polarization has recently become a prominent social problem in many societies, but whether negative media tone is a possible culprit for opinion polarization remains unclear. Using opinion-polling data on approval ratings of Chief Executive from the Public Opinion Program at the University of Hong Kong, we examined the longitudinal r...

Government response to public opinion is essential to democratic theory and practice. However, previous research on the relationship between public opinion and government attention predominantly focuses on western societies. Little is known about such relationship in nonwestern or nondemocratic societies. Drawing upon time-series data of public opi...

How governments and Internet companies regulate user data on social media attracts public attention. This study tried to answer two questions: What kind of countries send more requests for Facebook user data? What kind of countries get more requests replies from Facebook? We aim to figure out how a country's economic, political and social factors a...

Perception of party polarization has a positive impact on political participation. While past research suggests that such impact depends upon people’s information use, empirical evidence is lacking. We used a mediated moderation model to test the multiplicative effect between polarization perception and media use on political participation. The dat...

Different types of media use exert distinctive influences over political participation of various forms. Drawing on the O-S-R-O-R (Orientation–Stimulus–Reasoning–Orientation–Response) model of political communication effects, this study proposes a theoretical model to connect traditional news media use and online alternative media use to both insti...

China is one of the world’s most sophisticated Internet censoring countries. Chinese Internet users who wish to visit blocked Web sites will have to use circumvention tools to get around the Great Firewall, a censoring system inspecting, filtering, and blocking foreign Web sites outside China. Using a nationally representative survey dataset, this...

The use of social media such as Twitter has changed our life routines. Previous studies have found consistent diurnal patterns of user activities on social media platforms. However, the temporal organization of human behaviors is partly socially constructed and is determined by numerous factors other than the diurnal cycle. The current study argues...

The multitrait-multimethod matrix (MTMM), developed by Campbell and Fiske (1959) is a method for assessing construct validity, in particular, convergent validity and discriminant validity. The method requires the researcher to measure a set of traits using multiple methods in one study. With measures of different traits by different methods, resear...

Criticism of government is prevalent on news websites all over the world, but not many studies have investigated its influence on citizen satisfaction with government. This study proposes an inconsistent mediation model, which theorizes impacts on citizen government satisfaction coming from both the content of criticism and the context within which...

This study examines the phenomenon of politically motivated selective avoidance on Facebook in the context of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement protests in 2014. We conceptualize selective avoidance as individual choices that users make to shield themselves from undesirable dissonant views by removing unwanted information and breaking social ties tha...

Digital activism researchers have paid much attention to the use of communication technology in collective actions in China but ignored the role of new media in formal political participation. This study examined independent candidates’ use of social and mobile media for participating in national politics during local People’s Congress campaigns in...

Digital activism researchers have paid much attention to the use of communication technology in collective actions in China but ignored the role of new media in formal political participation. The appearance of independent campaigners and their presence on the most popular Chinese micro-blogging site in local People's Congress elections in 2011and...

Based on a nationwide survey, this study examines the mediated constructions of political ideology and its antecedents in contemporary China. The empirical findings offer insights into China’s future by examining political beliefs in the country. Our study found that most of the respondents share an inclination toward Liberalism, indicating that th...

Privacy is a culturally specific phenomenon. As social media platforms are going global, questions concerning privacy practices in a cross-cultural context become increasingly important. The purpose of this study is to examine cultural variations of privacy settings and self-disclosure of geolocation on Twitter. We randomly selected 3.3 million Twi...

This study extends the spiral silence theory and investigates the influence of perceived incongruence in opinion climate on individuals' intentions to express their true thoughts. Three intervening variables were examined to explain the process by which perceived incongruence in opinion climate leads to self-censorship: ambivalence, perceived opini...

The present study examines political discussion forums from 54 societies and links communicative inequality to features of cultural traditions, value orientations, and political systems. Results show that inequalities among discussion threads in attracting readers’ attention and responses exist in all discussion forums. Most of the discussion threa...

A telephone survey was conducted in a metropolitan city in 2012 to examine people`s credibility ratings of different media outlets, in particular, Weibo - one of the most popular social media platforms in China. Our findings suggest: First, people place more trust in traditional news media than in online sources by a significant margin. Second, dem...

As China is increasingly integrated into the processes of economic, political, social, and cultural globalization, important questions arise about how Chinese people perceive and evaluate such processes. At the same time, international communication scholars have long been interested in how local, national, and transnational media communications sh...

This study aims to explore the patterns and trends of Internet news use in a Chinese metropolis, Shanghai. By analyzing news webpage browsing data from three selected months in 2009, 2010, and 2011, we seek to present some evidence other than self-report data, which were widely used in past research but subject to the influence of memory limitation...

Despite being caught between political censorship and market pressure, investigative journalism in China has exhibited persistent vibrancy over the last three decades. This report seeks to understand the driving force behind this phenomenon by exploring the demographic composition and the ways in which Chinese investigative reporters perceive their...

Internet censorship has been attracting much attention from scholars and institutes, and several aspects have been studied, including IP blocking, keywords filtering and deletion in social media. However, although news is frequently subject to censorship, censorial practices in news websites have never been comprehensively described or quantified....

Research has examined the relationship between traditional news media use and normatively important political outcomes such as knowledge and participation. However, most research fails to account for variations in the nature of news over time and across communities that could alter the fundamental relationship between exposure and these outcomes. H...

本文是首次针对国内调查记者群进行问卷调查的一部分，旨在研究调查记者的职业满意度及其影响因素。通过对全国范围内259名调查记者的问卷调查，结果发现：调查记者的职业满意度整体一般；他们对同事关系、工作方式及社会影响等非物质性的回报相对满意，对收入、福利、升职机会等物质或功利性回报不满意；调查记者对工作非物质回报和工作协作及关系的评价呈显著正相关，工作物质回报与非物质回报呈显著负相关；收入、年龄、继续从事调查记者的意愿、工作所在地域和媒体类型，均对其职业满意度有影响。

This study examines theoretical connections among three variables, each in its own way engendering profound political implications for the Chinese society today: news use, national pride, and political trust. We focused on the impact of ?positivity bias in news? and advanced a theoretical model on the basis of framing theory to address the dynamics...

This article tests the cross-cultural generality of one tenet of spiral of silence theory using an individual difference approach. We argue that the spiral of silence phenomenon is, in part, a manifestation of individual differences in stable personality traits that can be measured universally regardless of country or context -specifically, fear of...

本文依据《新传播形态下的中国受众》来自全国31个省、直辖市、自治区[2]的问卷调查数据,对不同地域受众媒介使用行为的特征及差异进行比较研究.文章首先简要描述新媒介环境下中国受众对电视、报纸、杂志、广播和互联网等不同媒介的使用行为；继而,重点比较了31个省份受众媒介使用行为的差异,以及不同地区受众(东部、西部和中部)、省市县受众媒介使用行为的差异.由此,试图从纵向(行政级别差异)、横向(不同省份、地区)两个维度勾勒中国受众的媒介使用特征.研究发现；不同地区受众的媒介使用行为存在显著差异,而影响差异的因素包括经济发展水平、媒介竞争状况、区域政治文化等多种因素.

本文的主要目的在于探析我国受众的媒介公信力评价, 以及公信力评价对公民政治认知和 行为的影响, 同时比较媒介可信度与媒介表现这两个常用的媒介公信力指标对四个因变量的预测 效度. 数据分析显示: 1) 电视仍然是公信力最高的媒介形式, 互联网的可信度仅高于杂志; 2) 媒介公信力评价与社会问题感知, 政治犬儒主义情绪, 对新闻深度处理策略和个人意见表达均有 显著关系; 3) 媒介表现评价对四个因变量的解释力度大于媒介可信度评价.

本文是针对中国调查记者行业第一次总体普查所得的调查报告,研究发现:调查记者行业主要由男性主导,年纪较轻,学历较高；他们普遍有8年从业经历,具有较丰富的实践经验；有1/3的籍贯来自湖南和河南,服务媒体和工作地点主要集中在北京、广州和上海；他们具有相似的价值观和职业意识,强调媒体的监督、启蒙作用；具有较强的判断能力和职业水平,不轻易受名利诱惑,不愿意被行政权力和商业利益制约,更加具有自主性.不过,他们的生存状态并不理想,有40％的调查记者“不打算继续”从事调查性报道.为此,我们建议既要改善其职业待遇,更要优化其报道环境,保障采访权利、扩大报道空间.

This study1 investigates the relationship between news media use and media participation intention in China by adopting an audience-oriented perspective in light of the changing patterns of media content concomitant with widespread commercialization in reformed China. Data from a total of 2,409 valid face-to-face interviews were collected in four c...

This study investigates the effects of media exposure on individuals’ perception of opinion diversity and the psychological mechanisms underlying such effects. We compare the differential contributions of monopolistic with pluralistic media messages and test two conceptual models: The first delineates a mechanism of direct impact of media exposure...

Various forms of news use not only have independent impacts on political knowledge, but also create interactive effects across different types of news outlets. In the present study, data from 2 surveys conducted in 2004 were used to test hypotheses about the contingent effects of news media use on political knowledge. The results supported the intr...

The severe internet censorship implemented in China naturally raises substantial doubt about the potential democratic functions of the internet. This study presents some initial empirical evidence for internet use's impact on online opinion expression in Mainland China by analyzing three survey datasets collected by the World Internet Project in 20...

Politics and economics are inextricably linked. This article argues that the economy has been an underdeveloped contextual variable capable of coordinating the process and consequences of political communication. A theoretical model connecting microindividual outcomes to macrosocial functioning is proposed to capture the dynamic ecology of citizens...

The concept of news media use1 has been at the center of political communication research during the past several decades. Historically, scholars have employed measures of exposure to news (Atkin, Galloway, & Nayman, 1976), attention to news (Chaffee & Schleuder, 1986; McLeod & McDonald, 1985), and reliance on news (Culbertson & Stempel, 1986) to t...

This study proposes a “media momentum model,” arguing that the amount of news coverage candidates receive might influence their candidacy potency and duration. The two mechanisms that drive this process are rational choice on the candidates' side and cue taking on the voters' side. Based on data from the primary elections in the past two decades, t...

Introduction. This is the written version of the keynote address (Making user studies matter: Thank you Mister Feynman and Monsieur Foucault) delivered by senior author Dervin. The paper is linked to the Invited Paper in this issue and like that paper, reports on a project involving a dialogue between researchers and practitioners in library and in...

This research is contextualized in a special crisis situation, the SARS epidemic, in Macao to test a model of behavior prediction. We tackle questions and specify conditions in four areas through the analysis of the interrelationships among patterns of media use, modes of information processing, evaluative responses, and behaviors. A total probabil...