King-Wa Fu
Biographic Data
| ID | 1730801 |
|---|---|
| NAME | King-Wa Fu |
| GIVEN NAMES | King-Wa |
| FAMILY NAME | Fu |
| SIGNATURE | FU K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8157-5276 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 137 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Propagandization of policy reversal
When authoritarian regime makes a policy U-turn from restrictive to easing measures, how does the propaganda adjust its narratives to avoid ridiculing oneself? Drawing on the policy agenda control framework, this study investigates how Chinese state media deployed nationalistic narratives to cover ‘dynamic zeroing’ and ‘living with the virus’ policies in the news before and after the major policy change. Between January 2020 and March 2023, this …
How Propaganda Works in the Digital Era
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 and 2019. Results show that through the digital transformation, newspapers are deliberately distanc…
Examining family pre-pandemic influences on adolescent psychosocial wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic
The power of digital activism for transnational advocacy
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 test the power of digital media. This study uses a data set of 154 million Twitter posts and a time-se…
Digital mobilization via attention building
Scholars have noticed that contemporary digitally-mediated activism is hybridized in terms of organizational structures, action-repertoires, and underlying movement logics. However, to what extent such hybridization takes place in contentious politics and whether or not the process benefits the goal of movement mobilization remain uncertain. This study scrutinizes the mechanism of online activism in an analysis of 2 million Telegram Channel messa…
Propagandization of Relative Gratification
While many previous studies have investigated propaganda in connection with misinformation, disinformation, or "fake news" campaigns, they have given insufficient attention to the political messages which are not squarely factually inaccurate but manipulated. This study identifies a political communication strategy, the propagandization of relative gratification, through which propaganda media 1) highlight global chaos to nudge the public's downw…
WuhanDiary and #WuhanLockdown
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 has identified, to date, the perpetuity of traditional gendered norms and experiences. Yet these stu…
Using Latent Class Analyses to Examine Health Disparities among Young Children in Socially Disadvantaged Families during the Covid-19 Pandemic
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 families of preschoolers living in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of Hong Kong based on patterns of family…
A tale of two city-states
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 sizes, a shared history of SARS, and advanced medical systems. Although both were able to contain the v…
A Longitudinal Study of the Relation between Childhood Activities and Psychosocial Adjustment in Early Adolescence
Parent-child play time is important for healthy psychosocial development. More efforts should be directed to urge parents and caregivers to replace child-alone screen time with parent-child play time
Conversing or Diffusing Information
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 accounts. The features of the most retweeted accounts and the most retweeted tweets also were examined. Th…
Tweets and Memories
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 June 1–4 between 2012 and 2018 were analysed and thematically classified into five categories: collect…
Specificity, Conflict, and Focal Point
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 topics excluded, we find that article specificity raises the odds of being censored. Also, an examin…
Speaking up or staying silent? Examining the influences of censorship and behavioral contagion on opinion (non-) expression in China
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 that people tend to stay silent when the censorship in the global environment is intensive, whereas t…
Did the world overlook the media’s early warning of Covid-19
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 governance, and the role of WHO
The Relationship Between Interdisciplinarity and Journal Impact Factor in the Field of Communication During 1997–2016
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 and 2016. The analysis reveals that the percentages of issued and received out-field citations have re…
How did Ebola information spread on twitter
Broadcasting was the dominant mechanism of information diffusion of a major health event on Twitter. It suggests that public health communicators can work beneficially with influential and hidden influential users to get the message across, because influential and hidden influential users can reach more people that are not following the public health Twitter accounts. Although both influential users and hidden influential users can trigger many r…
Development of the Hong Kong Identity Scale
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 ‘HongKongese’ and others with stronger Mainland-Chinese-oriented identity. Cultural attribute, such as la…
The “mutual ignoring” mechanism of cyberbalkanization
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 constructed using data shared on Facebook Pages during the 2014 Hong Kong protests. Our findings indicate “mu…
Internet Use and Protest Politics in South Korea and Taiwan
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 consider higher-cost actions such as attending demonstrations and joining in boycotts. But it does n…
The Relationship Between Cyberbalkanization and Opinion Polarization
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 were constructed by a post-sharing network of 1,644 Facebook pages (101,410 shares); the differences…
Weibo
Networked framing between source posts and their reposts
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 widely. But this assumption has hardly been tested and preliminary evidence suggests practices for ret…
Building a typology of young people’s conventional and online political participation
Previous studies of the impact of social media 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 constructed a four-group typology for young people’s political participation in a randomized mobi…
Privacy protection and self-disclosure across societies
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 Twitter accounts from more than 100 societies. Results revealed considerable cultural and societal diff…
Development of the Hong Kong Identity Scale
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 ‘HongKongese’ and others with stronger Mainland-Chinese-oriented identity. Cultural attribute, such as la…
Speaking up or staying silent? Examining the influences of censorship and behavioral contagion on opinion (non-) expression in China
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 that people tend to stay silent when the censorship in the global environment is intensive, whereas t…
The Relationship Between Cyberbalkanization and Opinion Polarization
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 were constructed by a post-sharing network of 1,644 Facebook pages (101,410 shares); the differences…
Privacy protection and self-disclosure across societies
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 Twitter accounts from more than 100 societies. Results revealed considerable cultural and societal diff…
Propagandization of Relative Gratification
While many previous studies have investigated propaganda in connection with misinformation, disinformation, or "fake news" campaigns, they have given insufficient attention to the political messages which are not squarely factually inaccurate but manipulated. This study identifies a political communication strategy, the propagandization of relative gratification, through which propaganda media 1) highlight global chaos to nudge the public's downw…
Changes in suicide rates following media reports on celebrity suicide
Economic fluctuations and suicide
Information Overload, Similarity, and Redundancy
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 their activities in 2 waves. A multilevel logistic regression model was deployed to test our hypotheses…
The power of digital activism for transnational advocacy
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 test the power of digital media. This study uses a data set of 154 million Twitter posts and a time-se…
Did the world overlook the media’s early warning of Covid-19
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 governance, and the role of WHO
Who Do You Trust? Comparing People-Centered Communications in Disaster Situations in the United States and China
We use a theoretical sampling approach to investigate and compare communications in two crisis situations – the Sichuan earthquake in China and Hurricane Katrina in the US. We propose to re-conceptualize crisis communications, with the possibility of recognizing non-hierarchical and reciprocal interactions between authorities, traditional and social media, and individuals in crisis planning policy. We bring the issues of political and social trus…
Building a typology of young people’s conventional and online political participation
Previous studies of the impact of social media 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 constructed a four-group typology for young people’s political participation in a randomized mobi…
Suicide rates among working-age adults in South Korea before and after the 2008 economic crisis
BACKGROUND: Multiple studies have shown that macroeconomic factors are associated with changes in suicide rates. We investigated how changes in economic conditions associated with the recent economic crisis in South Korea influenced suicide rates among working-age adults. METHODS: Time-series analyses were performed to examine the temporal associations of national unemployment rates and sex-employment-specific suicide rates in South Korea from 20…
Tweets and Memories
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 June 1–4 between 2012 and 2018 were analysed and thematically classified into five categories: collect…
Use of Microblogs in Grassroots Movements in China
This study examines the role of online networking in a grassroots movement in China. Drawing on Manuel Castells’s theory of communication power in the network society, we argue that microblogs can facilitate China’s mass self-communication in a network environment, even under authoritarian control, and are able to challenge the power of agenda setting, which has been mainly dominated by the state and the state media. We study a grassroots movemen…
Internet Use and Protest Politics in South Korea and Taiwan
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 consider higher-cost actions such as attending demonstrations and joining in boycotts. But it does n…
Newspaper reporting of suicides in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Guangzhou
BACKGROUND: Media guidelines for suicide reporting are available in many countries. However, to what extent the mass media comply with the guidelines is unknown. Few studies are available that investigate systematically whether the mass media reflect the epidemiological reality of suicide deaths in their articles. METHODS: Based on the WHO media guidelines, this study investigated the characteristics of newspaper articles of suicides in three Chi…
Long-term impact of celebrity suicide on suicidal ideation
Background: The short-term effect of celebrity suicide on the overall suicide rate is widely known, but long-term effects remain unclear. Objective: To examine whether celebrity suicide is associated with suicidal ideation over a longer period. Design: This is a study on the effect of the suicide of a famous Hong Kong entertainment celebrity, who committed suicide on 1 April 2003, on suicide thoughts of the community. A population-based survey wa…
Long-term impact of celebrity suicide on suicidal ideation
Background: The short-term effect of celebrity suicide on the overall suicide rate is widely known, but long-term effects remain unclear. Objective: To examine whether celebrity suicide is associated with suicidal ideation over a longer period. Design: This is a study on the effect of the suicide of a famous Hong Kong entertainment celebrity, who committed suicide on 1 April 2003, on suicide thoughts of the community. A population-based survey wa…
Economic fluctuations and suicide
Newspaper reporting of suicides in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Guangzhou
BACKGROUND: Media guidelines for suicide reporting are available in many countries. However, to what extent the mass media comply with the guidelines is unknown. Few studies are available that investigate systematically whether the mass media reflect the epidemiological reality of suicide deaths in their articles. METHODS: Based on the WHO media guidelines, this study investigated the characteristics of newspaper articles of suicides in three Chi…
Newspaper coverage of emergency response and government responsibility in domestic natural disasters
Based on a comparative approach, this article reports content analyses of news articles about a devastating earthquake that occurred in Sichuan province, China, from six Chinese newspapers, indicating that the Chinese media, in reporting the government’s emergency responses, had many similarities with the American media's coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Further comparisons, however, suggest that the claim of a ‘watchdog’ media culture duri…
Who Do You Trust? Comparing People-Centered Communications in Disaster Situations in the United States and China
We use a theoretical sampling approach to investigate and compare communications in two crisis situations – the Sichuan earthquake in China and Hurricane Katrina in the US. We propose to re-conceptualize crisis communications, with the possibility of recognizing non-hierarchical and reciprocal interactions between authorities, traditional and social media, and individuals in crisis planning policy. We bring the issues of political and social trus…
Changes in suicide rates following media reports on celebrity suicide
Assessing Censorship on Microblogs in China
The authors investigated censorship practices and the use of microblogs-or weibos, in Chinese-using 111 million microblogs collected between 1 January and 30 June 2012. To better control for alternative explanations for censorship decisions attributable to an individual's characteristics and choices, they used a matched case-control study design to determine a list of Chinese terms that discriminate censored and uncensored posts written by the sa…
Building a model for encouraging help-seeking for depression
Background Clinical depression has been increasingly prevalent in international health statistics but people are often found to be reluctant to seek help when they encounter depression. However, there is no general theory to explain how personal, social and cultural factors affect an individual’s help-seeking intention, nor to guide the design of preventive programmes for such intention once needed. Methods Drawing on the theory of planned behavi…
Use of Microblogs in Grassroots Movements in China
This study examines the role of online networking in a grassroots movement in China. Drawing on Manuel Castells’s theory of communication power in the network society, we argue that microblogs can facilitate China’s mass self-communication in a network environment, even under authoritarian control, and are able to challenge the power of agenda setting, which has been mainly dominated by the state and the state media. We study a grassroots movemen…
Suicide rates among working-age adults in South Korea before and after the 2008 economic crisis
BACKGROUND: Multiple studies have shown that macroeconomic factors are associated with changes in suicide rates. We investigated how changes in economic conditions associated with the recent economic crisis in South Korea influenced suicide rates among working-age adults. METHODS: Time-series analyses were performed to examine the temporal associations of national unemployment rates and sex-employment-specific suicide rates in South Korea from 20…
The prevalence and correlates of severe social withdrawal (hikikomori) in Hong Kong
BACKGROUND: Severe social withdrawal behaviors among young people have been a subject of public and clinical concerns. AIMS: This study aimed to explore the prevalence of social withdrawal behaviors among young people aged 12-29 years in Hong Kong. METHODS: A cross-sectional telephone-based survey was conducted with 1,010 young individuals. Social withdrawal behaviors were measured with the proposed research diagnostic criteria for hikikomori and…
Weibo
Networked framing between source posts and their reposts
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 widely. But this assumption has hardly been tested and preliminary evidence suggests practices for ret…
Building a typology of young people’s conventional and online political participation
Previous studies of the impact of social media 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 constructed a four-group typology for young people’s political participation in a randomized mobi…
Privacy protection and self-disclosure across societies
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 Twitter accounts from more than 100 societies. Results revealed considerable cultural and societal diff…
Information Overload, Similarity, and Redundancy
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 their activities in 2 waves. A multilevel logistic regression model was deployed to test our hypotheses…
The Relationship Between Cyberbalkanization and Opinion Polarization
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 were constructed by a post-sharing network of 1,644 Facebook pages (101,410 shares); the differences…
The “mutual ignoring” mechanism of cyberbalkanization
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 constructed using data shared on Facebook Pages during the 2014 Hong Kong protests. Our findings indicate “mu…
Internet Use and Protest Politics in South Korea and Taiwan
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 consider higher-cost actions such as attending demonstrations and joining in boycotts. But it does n…
The Relationship Between Interdisciplinarity and Journal Impact Factor in the Field of Communication During 1997–2016
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 and 2016. The analysis reveals that the percentages of issued and received out-field citations have re…
How did Ebola information spread on twitter
Broadcasting was the dominant mechanism of information diffusion of a major health event on Twitter. It suggests that public health communicators can work beneficially with influential and hidden influential users to get the message across, because influential and hidden influential users can reach more people that are not following the public health Twitter accounts. Although both influential users and hidden influential users can trigger many r…
Development of the Hong Kong Identity Scale
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 ‘HongKongese’ and others with stronger Mainland-Chinese-oriented identity. Cultural attribute, such as la…
Specificity, Conflict, and Focal Point
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 topics excluded, we find that article specificity raises the odds of being censored. Also, an examin…
Speaking up or staying silent? Examining the influences of censorship and behavioral contagion on opinion (non-) expression in China
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 that people tend to stay silent when the censorship in the global environment is intensive, whereas t…
Did the world overlook the media’s early warning of Covid-19
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 governance, and the role of WHO
Political science (23 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (19 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Social media (15 works) · Social Media and Politics (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · China (13 works) · Law (13 works)