King-wa Fu

The University of Hong Kong | HKU · Journalism and Media Studies Centre

Recent literature has underscored the power of digital activism, but few studies have symmetrically examined its impact beyond domestic audiences and among illiberal regimes. The co-occurrence of mass protests in East and Southeast Asia in 2019–2021, when protesters called for help from international communities, offers a valuable opportunity to te...

Digital technology can empower citizen journalism as well as state media in authoritarian regimes. China’s propaganda apparatus has undertaken a series of transformations to adapt itself to the changing media environment. This study investigates this adaptive process by drawing on over five million Weibo posts created by 103 newspapers between 2012...

Rising income inequality is strongly linked to health disparities, particularly in regions where uneven distribution of wealth and income has long been a concern. Despite emerging evidence of COVID-19-related health inequalities for adults, limited evidence is available for children and their parents. This study aimed to explore subtypes of familie...

Social media can be both a source of information and misinformation during health emergencies. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media became a ubiquitous tool for people to communicate and represents a rich source of data researchers can use to analyse users’ experiences, knowledge and sentiments. Research on social media posts during COVID-19...

Background: Digital competence can help children and adolescents engage with technology for acquiring new knowledge and for broadening social contact and support, while reducing the risk of inappropriate media use. This study investigated the effects of digital competence on the risk of gaming addiction among children and adolescents. We explored w...

During the COVID-19 lockdown, with social distancing measures in place and a decrease in social activities, emotional states are more likely to be transferred between family members via increased interactions and communication. However, longitudinal evidence, particularly for early adolescents, is lacking. This study investigated family pre-pandemi...

This study examines the one-way information diffusion and two-way dialogic engagement present in public health Twitter chats. Network analysis assessed whether Twitter chats adhere to one of the key principles for online dialogic communication, the dialogic loop (Kent & Taylor, 1998) for four public health-related chats hosted by CDC Twitter accoun...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Interventions on adolescent drinking have yielded mixed results. We assessed the effectiveness of an Internet quiz game intervention compared to conventional health education. METHODS In this cluster randomized controlled trial with parallel group design, we randomly allocated 30 participating schools to the Internet quiz...

Background Good family relationships are important for mental health. However, the mechanism linking family perceptions to mental wellness during political and social turmoil remains unclear. This study aimed to examine whether psychological and social factors could protect university students from detrimental mental health conditions in a time of...

Instead of focusing on the regime’s control mechanism, this study identified a group of Chinese netizens who, despite being well aware of media censorship, posted on social media to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre annually. Drawing on the concepts of ritualization and social signalling, 1,256 censored Sina Weibo posts published on Ju...

Background: Although an increasing body of research shows that excessive screen time could impair brain development, whereas non-screen recreational activities can promote the development of adaptive emotion regulation and social skills, there is a lack of comparative research on this topic. Hence, this study examined whether and to what extent th...

Background Existing studies on health-related quality of life (HRQoL) mainly covered single growth stages of childhood or adolescence and did not report on the trends in the relationships of HRQoL with sleep duration, physical activity, and screen time. This study aimed to establish the population norm of HRQoL in children and adolescents aged 6–17...

Objectives: This study aimed to identify key factors affecting Healthcare workers (HCWs) perceived stress and risk of contracting COVID-19 among themselves and their family members during the pandemic. Methods: A cross-sectional online questionnaire study was conducted between 19 March and April 5, 2020 in Hong Kong. HCWs from public hospitals and...

The East Asian experience in tackling COVID-19 has been highly praised, but this high-level generalisation neglects variation in pandemic response measures adopted across countries as well as the socio-political factors that shaped them. This paper compares the early pandemic response in Singapore and Hong Kong, two Asian city-states of similar siz...

Many have suggested that communication on social media could mobilize participation in social movements. Often overlooked is the use of social media communication by opponents of social movements to counteract the change advocated. Collecting data from the Facebook Graph API, this study examines both types of communication on public pages of Facebo...

Internet censorship mechanisms in China are highly dynamic and yet to be fully accounted for by existing theories. This study interrogates postpublication censorship on Chinese social media by examining the differences between 2,280 pairs of censored WeChat articles and matched remaining articles. With the effects of account attributes and article...

Despite being designed to go unnoticed, censorship apparatus would occasionally manifest itself under various circumstances. In this study, we formulate four layers of censorship exposure where individual users can come across censorship. We investigate how different layers of censorship exposure influence users’ opinion expressions. Results show t...

Objective To disentangle the pathways between parent technology use, parent-child interactions, child screen time, and child psychosocial difficulties among disadvantaged families in Hong Kong. Study design Parents of 1,254 3-years-olds from the [email protected] project reported on the number of hours their children used electronic devices every...

This perspective is written to give a rapid response to discuss the role of media in risk communication in the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze two sets of media data, China’s social media and global news event, and draw a few initial observations in relation to the impacts of China’s information control policy, global risk g...

Background Awareness and attentiveness have implications for the acceptance and adoption of disease prevention and control measures. Social media posts provide a record of the public’s attention to an outbreak. To measure the attention of Chinese netizens to COVID-19, a pre-established nationally representative cohort of Weibo users was searched fo...

Background Children have high levels of curiosity and eagerness to explore. This makes them more vulnerable to danger and hazards, and they thus have a higher risk of injury. Safety education such as teaching safety rules and tips is vital to prevent children from injuries. Although game-based approaches have the potential to capture children’s att...

BACKGROUND Children have high levels of curiosity and eagerness to explore. This makes them more vulnerable to danger and hazards, and they thus have a higher risk of injury. Safety education such as teaching safety rules and tips is vital to prevent children from injuries. Although game-based approaches have the potential to capture children’s att...

BACKGROUND Pokémon Go is a very popular location-based augmented reality game with widespread influences over the world. An emerging body of research demonstrates that playing Pokémon Go can lead to improvements in physical activity and psychosocial wellbeing and thus may have a protective effect against self-harm. However, the population-level imp...

Background Pokémon Go is a very popular location-based augmented reality game with widespread influences over the world. An emerging body of research demonstrates that playing Pokémon Go can lead to improvements in physical activity and psychosocial well-being; however, whether Pokémon Go reduces self-harm incidence at the population-level is still...

This study deployed a systematic method to develop and validate a measurement for the identity of Hong Kong people, reflecting the emerging localistic attitude in the city. Drawing on a two-dimensional identity model, a combination of cultural and civic domains, an operationalization for Hong Kong identity was derived to differentiate between ‘Hong...

Introduction: Twitter and media coverage on poliomyelitis help maintain global support for its eradication. Objective: To test our hypothesis that themes of polio-related tweets and media articles would differ by location of interest (hashtag of country name mentioned in the tweet; country name mentioned in media articles) but would be similar t...

This study tests a hypothesis that information sources (e.g., Facebook pages) that share information more frequently with each other have high level of audience overlapping. This association is also hypothesized to be politically motivated. To test the empirical relationship, a Facebook pages sharing network was created using the information shared...

Widespread Chinese social media applications such as Weibo are widely known for monitoring and deleting posts to conform to Chinese government requirements. In this paper, we focus on analyzing a dataset of censored and uncensored posts in Weibo. Despite previous work that only considers text content of posts, we take a multi-modal approach that ta...

As a pedagogical demonstration of Twitter data analysis, a case study of HIV/AIDS-related tweets around World AIDS Day, 2014, was presented. This study examined if Twitter users from countries with various income levels responded differently to World AIDS Day. The performance of support vector machine (SVM) models as classifiers of relevant tweets...

Cyberbalkanization has growingly become common on the Internet and can lead to public’s opinion polarization. This study investigates a specific process of cyberbalkanization through which incivility is circulated within online communities. From a dataset of Hong Kong-based Facebook Pages collected during a social movement, a set of politically-org...

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)-enhanced exercise training is a novel approach to promoting health. Previous systematic reviews have focused on the effectiveness of VR interventions in clinical settings. The present study was the first systematic review to investigate the effectiveness of exercise-based VR and AR training as prevent...

Background Information and emotions towards public health issues could spread widely through online social networks. Although aggregate metrics on the volume of information diffusion are available, we know little about how information spreads on online social networks. Health information could be transmitted from one to many (i.e. broadcasting) or...

Some scholars argue that interdisciplinarity is a virtue for scholarship and impact, but others contend that interdisciplinarity undermines the development of core knowledge. This study examines 93 communication journals in the Social Science Citation Index, investigating their patterns of citing and being cited by other disciplines between 1997 an...

Introduction: We describe videos posted to the YouTube video-sharing Web site by US state health departments (SHDs) and associated institutional factors. Methods: YouTube channels from SHDs were identified, their data retrieved, and their videos saved to a playlist on January 10, 2016. Ten randomly sampled videos from each channel were manually...

Twitter is a social media platform where over 500 million people worldwide publish their ideas and discuss diverse topics, including their health conditions and public health events. Twitter has proved to be an important source of health-related information on the Internet, given the amount of information that is shared by both citizens and officia...

Chinese social media and big data represent an important share of the global Internet, but have received relatively less attention. This editorial examines three dominant discourses based on China's distinctive and complex political, economic and social realities: “Big Data” (technical focus), “Big Brother” (political focus), and “Big Profit” (econ...

Background: Twitter is used for World Pneumonia Day (WPD; November 12) communication. We evaluate if themes of #pneumonia tweets were associated with retweet frequency. Methods: A total of 28 181 original #pneumonia tweets were retrieved (21 November 2016), from which six subcorpora, 1 mo before and 1 mo after WPD 2011-2016, were extracted (n=67...

This study examines the association between Internet use and protest politics in South Korea and Taiwan, using secondary data from the sixth wave (2010–14) of the World Values Survey. The data show that Internet use is positively associated with low-cost protest acts, like signing a petition. Internet use is also correlated with the willingness to...

Background: The CDC hosts monthly panel presentations titled ‘Public Health Grand Rounds’ and publishes monthly reports known as Vital Signs. Hashtags #CDCGrandRounds and #VitalSigns were used to promote them on Twitter. Objectives: This study quantified the effect of hashtag count, mention count, and URL count and attaching visual cues to #CDCGran...

Background: The CDC hosts monthly panel presentations titled 'Public Health Grand Rounds' and publishes monthly reports known as Vital Signs. Hashtags #CDCGrandRounds and #VitalSigns were used to promote them on Twitter. Objectives: This study quantified the effect of hashtag count, mention count, and URL count and attaching visual cues to #CDCGra...

Cyberbalkanization has been observed in some online activities, but its mechanism remains uncertain. Drawing on the Social Balance Theory, we theorized that the formation of “mutual ignoring” triads (three actors in a group with only a pair of interacts) in a network is a key procedure for cyberbalkanization. A cyberbalkanized network was construct...

Cyberbalkanization has been observed in some online activities, but its mechanism remains uncertain. Drawing on the Social Balance Theory, we theorized that the formation of “mutual ignoring” triads (three actors in a group with only a pair of interacts) in a network is a key procedure for cyberbalkanization. A cyberbalkanized network was construct...

Background: Proper parent-child interaction is crucial for child development, but an assessment tool in Chinese is currently lacking. This study aimed to develop and validate a parent-reported parent-child interaction scale for Chinese preschool children. Methods: The Chinese parent-child interaction scale (CPCIS) was designed by an expert panel...

Introduction: Image-based social media Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Flickr have become sources of health-related information and tools for health communication. No known systematic review exists that summarizes the existing research and its health implications. Methods: We searched EBSCOhost Academic Search Complete, PubMed, and Web of Scie...

Aim The aim of this study was to explore the online distress and help-seeking behavior of youths in Hong Kong. Methods A cross-sectional telephone-based survey was conducted among 1,010 young people in Hong Kong. Logistic regression analysis was then performed to identify the factors associated with those who reported expressing emotional distress...

Background Advocates use the hashtag #GlobalHealth on Twitter to draw users' attention to prominent themes on global health, to harness their support, and to advocate for change. Objectives We aimed to describe #GlobalHealth tweets pertinent to given major health issues. Methods Tweets containing the hashtag #GlobalHealth (N = 157,951) from Janua...

Background Different linguo-cultural communities might react to an outbreak differently. The 2015 South Korean MERS outbreak presented an opportunity for us to compare tweets responding to the same outbreak in different languages. Methods We obtained a 1% sample through Twitter streaming application programming interface from June 1 to 30, 2015. W...

Online activity is often cyberbalkanized, but it remains unclear whether this phenomenon leads to polarization of public opinion or if the relationship works in the reverse direction. This study tested the temporal association between cyberbalkanization and opinion polarization during the debate on political reform in Hong Kong. Online communities...

China's control of information online is often imposed by social media platforms in the name of “rumor management.” This article examines the content moderation strategies of Sina Weibo, China's largest microblogging platform, in regulating discussion of rumors following the 2015 Tianjin blasts. More than 100,000 Weibo posts were collected and cate...

Objective To investigate whether school readiness could be affected by placing electronic devices (EDs) in children's bedroom and whether the relationship was moderated by parental restriction and family socioeconomic status (SES). Design This is a cross-sectional study with bedroom ED placement and parental restriction reported by parents. Multip...

Objective Pinterest (San Francisco, CA) and Instagram (Menlo Park, CA) are 2 popular photo-sharing social media platforms among young individuals. We assessed differences between Instagram and Pinterest in relaying photographic information regarding Zika virus. Specifically, we investigated whether the percentage of Zika-virus-related photos with S...

Objectives The purpose of this study was to describe the source, length, number of views, and content of the most widely viewed Zika virus (ZIKV)-related YouTube videos. We hypothesized that ZIKV-related videos uploaded by different sources contained different content. Methods The 100 most viewed English ZIKV-related videos were manually coded and...

It remains controversial whether community structures in social networks are beneficial or not for information diffusion. This study examined the relationships among four core concepts in social network analysis—network redundancy, information redundancy, ego-alter similarity, and tie strength—and their impacts on information diffusion. By using mo...

The emergence of social media has changed individuals' information consumption patterns. The purpose of this study is to explore the role of information overload, similarity, and redundancy in unsubscribing information sources from users' information repertoires. In doing so, we randomly selected nearly 7,500 ego networks on Twitter and tracked the...

Zika-related Twitter incidence peaked after the World Health Organization declared an emergency. Five themes were identified from Zika-related Twitter content: (1) societal impact of the outbreak; (2) government, public and private sector, and general public responses to the outbreak; (3) pregnancy and microcephaly: negative health consequences rel...

Social media allows users to share information and communicate interpersonally during natural disasters, environmental disasters, and other environmental concerns. We conducted a scoping review of the literature using the Arksey and O’Malley framework to examine how social media is used during these environmental concerns, determine what the implic...

Objectives: We systematically reviewed existing research pertinent to Ebola virus disease and social media, especially to identify the research questions and the methods used to collect and analyze social media. Methods: We searched 6 databases for research articles pertinent to Ebola virus disease and social media. We extracted the data using a...

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...

Objective: We analyzed misinformation about Ebola circulating on Twitter and Sina Weibo, the leading Chinese microblog platform, at the outset of the global response to the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic to help public health agencies develop their social media communication strategies. Methods: We retrieved Twitter and Sina Weibo data created within...

Previous studies of the social media impact on youth’s participation in politics are largely inconclusive. It is partly attributable to a diverse conceptualization of political participation and media use. Using a holistic definition of political participation and an analytical approach of building a typology of political participation, this study...

BACKGROUND:A pilot study about the effectiveness of a universal school-based programme, "The Little Prince is Depressed", for preventing depression in Chinese adolescents in Hong Kong was conducted and reported previously. This study used a larger sample to examine the effectiveness and sustainability of the programme. METHODS:This study used quasi...

This article examines the prominence of various user categories as opinion leaders, defined as initiators, agenda setters or disseminators, in 29 corruption cases exposed on Sina Weibo. It finds that ordinary citizens made up the largest category of initiators but that their power of opinion leadership was limited as they had to rely on media organ...

Social media use has complicated the conduct of foreign affairs by producing unintended audiences and opinions. This study examines Chinese Sina Weibo users’ framing of the political discourse of the 2012 Democratic National Convention (DNC). We found influential independent users and alternative commercial media, rather than official media, domina...

Retweeting a post on a social media platform is a part of a process of growing significance through which public opinion formation takes place. A ‘retweet count’ on, say Twitter or weibo, can be taken as a measure of user influence. The assumption is that when B retweets A's message, B empathizes with A and wishes to disseminate the message more wi...

Replication is an essential requirement for scientific discovery. The current study aims to generalize and replicate 10 propositions made in previous Twitter studies using a representative dataset. Our findings suggest 6 out of 10 propositions could not be replicated due to the variations of data collection, analytic strategies employed, and incons...

Background: Global Handwashing Day (GHD) is a handwashing promotion campaign organized by the Global Public-Private Partnership of Handwashing with Soap. In China, it has been promoted by the Chinese public health authorities, international organizations and multinational corporations through various channels including social media such as Sina We...

This study examines Chinese Sina Weibo users’ framing of the Obamas’ speeches at the 2012 Democratic National Convention (DNC). A critical investigation of the sources of the most popular microblogging posts on the Obamas’ speeches reveals that influential independent users and alterative commercial media rather than official media dominate the fra...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the temporal association between cyberbalkanization and real life polarization of public opinion during the Hong Kong Occupy Movement in 2014. 1,387 Facebook Pages about Hong Kong during July 1 to December 15, 2014 were collected, their publicly accessible posts were retrieved, and a post sharing network...

This paper examines the feature selection procedures of sentiment analysis on a multi-dialectal language. We analyzed a dataset with over 6 million microblogs in China, a multi-dialectal country, deployed sentiment classifier to examine the positive/negative emotion carried by the microblogs, and explored the regional variations in the optimal feat...