Sangwon Lee

• Professor
• Professor (Assistant) at Korea University

The double-edged nature of generative artificial intelligence (AI) underscores the importance of understanding complex and paradoxical public views about this emerging technology. Heeding to this call, this study examined how the general public perceives and reacts to Chat GPT and the implications of these perceptions, drawing on the third-person a...

This study advances the theoretical understanding of the effects of incidental news exposure on political knowledge by probing the mechanisms through which exposure transfers to learning. Two studies in the U.S. across both non-election and election settings test the centrality of political discussion on social media with strong and weak ties in ex...

The literature on misinformation has not provided sufficient empirical evidence concerning its political consequences. To amend this trend, this study examines how widespread misinformation on social media elevates political cynicism, which has peaked over the past decade in the United States. Using two-wave survey data collected both before and af...

To explain the participatory effects of news exposure, communication scholars have long relied upon the “virtuous circle” framework of media use and civic participation. That is, news consumption makes people more knowledgeable, and trustful toward institutions and political processes, making them active and responsible citizens, which then leads t...

Numerous studies have been conducted to identify the factors that predict trust/distrust in science. However, most of these studies are based on closed-ended survey research, which does not allow researchers to gain a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon. This study integrated survey analysis conducted within the United States with computat...

Introduction. Since its public launch, ChatGPT has gained the world's attention, demonstrating the immense potential of artificial intelligence (AI). Method. To explore factors influencing the adoption of ChatGPT, we ran structural equation modelling to test the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model while incorporating relative r...

Numerous studies have been conducted to identify the factors that predict trust/distrust in science. However, most of these studies are based on closed-ended survey research, which does not allow researchers to gain a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon. This study combined survey analysis with computational text analysis to uncover factor...

Studies exploring the association between social media use and belief in conspiracy theories have yielded mixed evidence. To address this inconsistency, we focus on conspiracy thinking – a predisposition to interpret events as products of secret, malevolent plots – for which contextual confounds can be better isolated. We posit that social media us...

Political participation has long been considered a cornerstone of democracy. While most studies on political participation have been grounded on a normative approach, which assumes that political participation is driven by positive civic actions, recent studies suggest that political participation is also driven by negative forces such as overconfi...

The literature on the relationship between social media and online political participation continues to expand. Yet, attention to the effect of cognitive dispositions central to user engagement on social media is rare. This study advances the current theoretical understanding of the effects of social media news use by focusing on online privacy con...

Despite abundant studies on “fake news,” the long-term consequences have been less explored. In this context, this study examines the dynamic relationship between traditional and social news media use, fake news exposure—measured as perceived fake news exposure and exposure to actual fake news stories, and mainstream media trust. We found interesti...

Many contemporary protests highlight global issues. These protests emerge as a method to influence global politics in the absence of formal structures for citizens to voice their concerns to global political leaders. Prior research establishes that political efficacy, political discussion, and political interest are important predictors of protest...

Scholarship has now recognized the potentially detrimental effects of social media on political knowledge. At the same time, a separate but similar line of work has raised concerns that these platforms are the primary vector of political misinformation. Despite the renewed focus on misinformation studies, the question as to whether political knowle...

This study examines the impact of message length and audience’s perceived information overload on the effectiveness of a fact-check in reducing belief in fake news within the COVID-19 vaccination context. Through an online experiment (N = 374) conducted in Singapore, we found an interaction effect between one’s level of information overload and the...

Protest has long been associated with left-wing actors and left-wing causes. However, right-wing actors also engage in protest. Are right-wing actors mobilized by the same factors as those actors on the left? This article uses cross-national survey data (i.e., US, UK, France, and Canada) gathered in February 2021 to assess the role of misinformatio...

Despite widespread concerns that misinformation is rampant on social media, little systematic and empirical research has been conducted on whether and how news consumption via social media affects people's accurate knowledge about COVID-19. Against this background, this study examines the causal effects of social media use on COVID-19 knowledge (i....

The study integrates multiple theoretical perspectives of communication infrastructure, social capital, and citizen journalism to examine the interplay of interconnected community storytelling networks, social trust, and citizen contribution to the public sphere on civic participation. An analysis of nationwide survey data indicates that citizens’...

Many of the individuals charged in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol did not have ties to far-right extremist groups, leading some pundits and researchers to speculate that extremism has become mainstream and much more common in the current political environment. In this article, we discuss events before and during January 6 that affe...

Grounded in Communication Infrastructure Theory (CIT), this study tests the moderating roles of expressive digital media use through the Internet, social, and mobile media between community storytelling network and civic engagement. Based on online survey data of U.S. adults in an ethnically homogenous metropolitan area, this study finds that commu...

Through a nationwide survey in South Korea, this study examines the relationship between different news comment engagement (reading, liking, and posting) and perceptions on the credibility of news portals, paying particular attention to the potential moderating role of news literacy. The results indicate a positive relationship between media use an...

Social media has been implicated in the proliferation of fabricated news narratives posing as professional journalism. In response, scholars have prioritized the study of the antecedents and outcomes of citizen's ability to detect so-called ‘fake news’. Growing evidence supports the cognitive involvement hypothesis, which states that deeper reflect...

On January 20, 2020, the CDC reported its first case of the novel coronavirus in the United States. Almost a year and a half later, efforts to vaccinate individuals in the hopes of achieving herd immunity continue. Despite the amounts of scientific breakthroughs to create and disseminate the vaccines, people continue to express hesitancy. Existing...

The aim of this study is to investigate the causal direction of the relationship between incidental news exposure via social media and political participation. Unlike prior studies, which have relied on cross-sectional data to examine this link, we used two panel data sets to better identify causal relationships. Specifically, we evaluate two unidi...

This study explores the effects of traditional media and social media on different types of knowledge about COVID-19. We also explore how surveillance motivation moderates the relationship between media use and different types of knowledge. Based on cross-national data from Singapore and the United States, we find that news seeking via social media...

Encountering news on social media is common even for individuals not actively looking for it – a phenomenon referred to as incidental exposure to political news (IE). A growing body of research has explored how IE on social media relates to political knowledge and participation. Yet, little research has considered that the effects of IE may differ...

Despite early promise, scholarship has shown little empirical evidence of learning from the news on social media. At the same time, scholars have documented the problem of information ‘snacking’ and information quality on these platforms. These parallel trends in the literature challenge long-held assumptions about the pro-social effects of news co...

Although interest in the efficacy of efforts to correct false beliefs has peaked in recent years, the extent to which corrective effects endure over time remains understudied. Drawing on insights from related literatures in the psychology of belief, persuasion and media effects to inform theoretical expectations, this study uses a longitudinal expe...

This study explores how emerging media platforms (i.e., social media and messaging apps) contribute to affective political polarization. We rely on cross-national data (USA and Japan), which allows us to explore the broader implications of how emerging media platforms contribute to political polarization in different cultural contexts. The results...

This study examines the causal effects of social media use on political knowledge as well as the underlying mechanisms through which such an effect occurs. The findings suggest that social media use hinders rather than enhances an individual’s learning about politics, because social media use fosters the perception that one no longer needs to activ...

The rapid emergence of digital media technologies, especially social media, has raised questions about their role in social movements. Despite some early skepticism about social media's mobilizing potential in social movements, numerous studies suggest that social media played an integral role in sparking the growth and spread of recent social move...

News credibility as an essential democratic value has been at the forefront of scholarly endeavors over the last several decades. Despite prolific research in this area, scholarship on the credibility of algorithm-based and automated news has yet to offer empirical findings in regards to the causes and their impacts. In line with prior studies conc...

This study sheds light on the recent use of social media for protests, with the 2016 South Korean candle light vigils as the case study. An extensive amount of literature has explored social media’s potential for informing and mobilizing the public to engage in protest activities. Previous research has mainly focused on the direct effect of social...

the role of social media in protest participation

Introduction. Given that people rely heavily on their party affiliation to make their political decisions, an interesting dilemma occurs when people are exposed to counter-attitudinal information from the party they identify with. This paper examines how exposure to counter-attitudinal messages from the party an individual identifies with influence...

The diffusion of innovations is a general framework about social change that has seen application in many disciplines, including engineering, marketing, management, natural resources, agriculture, high technology, education, political science, anthropology, sociology, journalism, and communication. Contemporary important issues among diffusion scho...

This study analyzed the coverage by two partisan South Korean newspapers of the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) pandemic, examining differences in their use of news frames and cited sources. A content analysis revealed that Hankyoreh, the left-wing newspaper, placed more emphasis on attributing responsibility to the government and society....

The diffusion of innovations is a general framework about social change that has seen application in many disciplines, including engineering, marketing, management, natural resources, agriculture, high technology, education, political science, anthropology, sociology, journalism, and communication. Contemporary important issues among diffusion scho...