Alvin Zhou
Biographic Data
| ID | 4036967 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alvin Zhou |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alvin |
| FAMILY NAME | Zhou |
| SIGNATURE | ZHOU A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Minnesota |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5410-9712 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Network Analysis in Advertising Research, Reimagined: A Methodological Catalyst for Structural and Institutional Insight
As digital systems increasingly mediate advertising, the field must move beyond message effects to engage with the structural and institutional dynamics that define the advertising ecosystem. This article argues that network analysis—when reimagined beyond its typical application to social media interactions—offers powerful tools for understanding the relationships among brands, consumers, media, influencers, and other intermediaries and stakehol…
Moral framing and issue-based framing of #StopAsianHate campaigns on Twitter
Guided by moral foundation theory (MFT), this study examines #StopAsianHate messages on Twitter to identify the main narratives surrounding the campaign. It also aims to unpack how moral framing and strategic narratives are related to online engagement size in social justice campaigns. Mixed methods were used to analyze the sampled tweets, including computational approaches based on the extended Moral Foundations Dictionary, structural topic mode…
Moral Foundations, Ideological Divide, and Public Engagement with U.S. Government Agencies’ Covid-19 Vaccine Communication on Social Media
Guided by moral foundation theory, this study examined how moral framing interacted with local constituents' ideological leaning to affect public engagement outcomes of government agencies' COVID-19 vaccine communication on Facebook. We analyzed a dataset of over 5,000 U.S. government agencies' Facebook posts on COVID-19 vaccines in 2021 (N = 70,671), assessed their use of moral language using a newly developed computational method, and examined …
User-Centric Behavioral Tracking: Lessons from Three Case Studies with Do-It-Yourself Computational Pipelines
User-centric behavioral tracking, a cutting-edge computational social science tool, holds tremendous promise for advertising research. The article introduces the technique and presents three do-it-yourself (DIY) case studies in which researchers develop tracking applications and platforms, build infrastructures that host participants, maintain computational pipelines logging user behavior and content exposure, and manage logistical “ins and outs”…
To Share or Not to Share: Examining Social Media in Public Relations Scholarship
Social media has become an indispensable component of everyday life and had a transformative impact on strategic communication. This study reflects on the influence of social media in scholarship and examines social media research to identify strengths, gaps, and assumptions in this body of literature. Using structural topic modeling and network analysis, this research models every word published in six leading journals studying public relations …
Politicization of Science in Covid-19 Vaccine Communication: Comparing US Politicians, Medical Experts, and Government Agencies
We compare the social media discourses on COVID-19 vaccines constructed by U.S. politicians, medical experts, and government agencies, and investigate how various contextual factors influence the likelihood of government agencies politicizing the issue. Taking the political corpus and the medical corpus as two extremes, we propose a language-based definition of politicization of science and measure it on a continuous scale. By building a machine …
Mobilizing Media Attention in the Era of Networked Publics: A Contentious Publicness Framework
Guided by the framework of contentious publicness, this study examines the role of mass media organizations in facilitating digital activism during the 2019–2020 Hong Kong anti-extradition movement. We collected movement tweets targeting media organizations, conceptualized as public-media messages, to identify what media outlets and what narratives were likely to generate more engagement. Findings revealed that activists tended to mobilize media …
The puzzle of misinformation: Exposure to unreliable content in the United States is higher among the better informed
Healthy news consumption requires limited exposure to unreliable content and ideological diversity in the sources consumed. There are two challenges to this normative expectation: the prevalence of unreliable content online; and the prominence of misinformation within individual news diets. Here, we assess these challenges using an observational panel tracking the browsing behavior of N ≈ 140,000 individuals in the United States for 12 months (Ja…
Who Says What in Which Networks: What influences Social Media Users’ Emotional Reactions to the Covid-19 Vaccine Infodemic
This study aims to identify effective predictors that influence publics’ emotional reactions to COVID-19 vaccine misinformation as well as corrective messages. We collected a large sample of COVID-19 vaccine related misinformation and corrective messages on Facebook as well as the users’ emotional reactions (i.e., emojis) to these messages. Focusing on three clusters of features such as messages’ linguistic features, source characteristics, and m…
Mask-Wearing as a Partisan Issue: Social Identity and Communication of Party Norms on Social Media Among Political Elites
This study draws on the social identity approach (SIA), to examine how political elites (i.e., members of the 116th United States Congress) communicated norms about mask-wearing on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using Twitter data collected in 2020, we found that Republican members of Congress were significantly less likely to promote mask-wearing than Democratic members. We also observed some variations in norm-conforming behaviors a…
Hashtag activism and connective action: A case study of #HongKongPoliceBrutality
Causal effects of affordance change on communication behavior: Empirical evidence from organizational and leadership social media use
Leadership going social: How U.S. nonprofit executives engage publics on Twitter
Beyond Anonymity: Network Affordances, Under Deindividuation, Improve Social Media Discussion Quality
The online sphere allows people to be personally anonymous while simultaneously being socially identifiable. Twitter users can use a pseudonym but signal allegiance to a political party in their profile (e.g., #MAGA). We explore the interplay of these two dimensions of anonymity on a custom-built social media platform that allowed us to examine the causal effects of personal and social anonymity on discussion quality. We find no support for the h…
The Longitudinal Dimension of Social-Mediated Movements: Hidden Brokerage and the Unsung Tales of Movement Spilloverers
This study traces the retweet networks among a group of movement spilloverers spanning across five social-mediated movements (i.e., People's Climate March, Women's March, #GrabYourWallet, March for Our Lives, and #StoptheBans) and examines the longitudinal inter-movement dynamics. Our analysis reveals that movement spillover is a widespread phenomenon existing in ideologically compatible movements across issue areas and lasted over 5 years. We al…
Hashtag homophily in twitter network: Examining a controversial cause-related marketing campaign
Brevity is the Soul of Twitter: The Constraint Affordance and Political Discussion
Many hoped that social networking sites would allow for the open exchange of information and a revival of the public sphere. Unfortunately, conversations on social media are often toxic and not conducive to healthy political discussions. Twitter, the most widely used social network for political discussions, doubled the limit of characters in a tweet in November 2017, which provided an opportunity to study the effect of technological affordances …
Society & the Internet: How networks of information and communication are changing our lives
Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media
Although political polarization in the United States has been known and discussed for a long time, the dramatic unfolding of the presidential election last year still appalled many citizens. The election, believed to be the most divided one in recent U.S. history, highlighted the underestimated ability of social media to reinforce echo chambers and polarize publics. In this sense, Sunstein's new book—#Republic—is extremely relevant to the current…
Politicization of Science in Covid-19 Vaccine Communication: Comparing US Politicians, Medical Experts, and Government Agencies
We compare the social media discourses on COVID-19 vaccines constructed by U.S. politicians, medical experts, and government agencies, and investigate how various contextual factors influence the likelihood of government agencies politicizing the issue. Taking the political corpus and the medical corpus as two extremes, we propose a language-based definition of politicization of science and measure it on a continuous scale. By building a machine …
Mask-Wearing as a Partisan Issue: Social Identity and Communication of Party Norms on Social Media Among Political Elites
This study draws on the social identity approach (SIA), to examine how political elites (i.e., members of the 116th United States Congress) communicated norms about mask-wearing on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using Twitter data collected in 2020, we found that Republican members of Congress were significantly less likely to promote mask-wearing than Democratic members. We also observed some variations in norm-conforming behaviors a…
Beyond Anonymity: Network Affordances, Under Deindividuation, Improve Social Media Discussion Quality
The online sphere allows people to be personally anonymous while simultaneously being socially identifiable. Twitter users can use a pseudonym but signal allegiance to a political party in their profile (e.g., #MAGA). We explore the interplay of these two dimensions of anonymity on a custom-built social media platform that allowed us to examine the causal effects of personal and social anonymity on discussion quality. We find no support for the h…
The Longitudinal Dimension of Social-Mediated Movements: Hidden Brokerage and the Unsung Tales of Movement Spilloverers
This study traces the retweet networks among a group of movement spilloverers spanning across five social-mediated movements (i.e., People's Climate March, Women's March, #GrabYourWallet, March for Our Lives, and #StoptheBans) and examines the longitudinal inter-movement dynamics. Our analysis reveals that movement spillover is a widespread phenomenon existing in ideologically compatible movements across issue areas and lasted over 5 years. We al…
The puzzle of misinformation: Exposure to unreliable content in the United States is higher among the better informed
Healthy news consumption requires limited exposure to unreliable content and ideological diversity in the sources consumed. There are two challenges to this normative expectation: the prevalence of unreliable content online; and the prominence of misinformation within individual news diets. Here, we assess these challenges using an observational panel tracking the browsing behavior of N ≈ 140,000 individuals in the United States for 12 months (Ja…
Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media
Although political polarization in the United States has been known and discussed for a long time, the dramatic unfolding of the presidential election last year still appalled many citizens. The election, believed to be the most divided one in recent U.S. history, highlighted the underestimated ability of social media to reinforce echo chambers and polarize publics. In this sense, Sunstein's new book—#Republic—is extremely relevant to the current…
Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media
Although political polarization in the United States has been known and discussed for a long time, the dramatic unfolding of the presidential election last year still appalled many citizens. The election, believed to be the most divided one in recent U.S. history, highlighted the underestimated ability of social media to reinforce echo chambers and polarize publics. In this sense, Sunstein's new book—#Republic—is extremely relevant to the current…
Society & the Internet: How networks of information and communication are changing our lives
Brevity is the Soul of Twitter: The Constraint Affordance and Political Discussion
Many hoped that social networking sites would allow for the open exchange of information and a revival of the public sphere. Unfortunately, conversations on social media are often toxic and not conducive to healthy political discussions. Twitter, the most widely used social network for political discussions, doubled the limit of characters in a tweet in November 2017, which provided an opportunity to study the effect of technological affordances …
Hashtag homophily in twitter network: Examining a controversial cause-related marketing campaign
Hashtag activism and connective action: A case study of #HongKongPoliceBrutality
Causal effects of affordance change on communication behavior: Empirical evidence from organizational and leadership social media use
Leadership going social: How U.S. nonprofit executives engage publics on Twitter
Beyond Anonymity: Network Affordances, Under Deindividuation, Improve Social Media Discussion Quality
The online sphere allows people to be personally anonymous while simultaneously being socially identifiable. Twitter users can use a pseudonym but signal allegiance to a political party in their profile (e.g., #MAGA). We explore the interplay of these two dimensions of anonymity on a custom-built social media platform that allowed us to examine the causal effects of personal and social anonymity on discussion quality. We find no support for the h…
The Longitudinal Dimension of Social-Mediated Movements: Hidden Brokerage and the Unsung Tales of Movement Spilloverers
This study traces the retweet networks among a group of movement spilloverers spanning across five social-mediated movements (i.e., People's Climate March, Women's March, #GrabYourWallet, March for Our Lives, and #StoptheBans) and examines the longitudinal inter-movement dynamics. Our analysis reveals that movement spillover is a widespread phenomenon existing in ideologically compatible movements across issue areas and lasted over 5 years. We al…
Who Says What in Which Networks: What influences Social Media Users’ Emotional Reactions to the Covid-19 Vaccine Infodemic
This study aims to identify effective predictors that influence publics’ emotional reactions to COVID-19 vaccine misinformation as well as corrective messages. We collected a large sample of COVID-19 vaccine related misinformation and corrective messages on Facebook as well as the users’ emotional reactions (i.e., emojis) to these messages. Focusing on three clusters of features such as messages’ linguistic features, source characteristics, and m…
Mask-Wearing as a Partisan Issue: Social Identity and Communication of Party Norms on Social Media Among Political Elites
This study draws on the social identity approach (SIA), to examine how political elites (i.e., members of the 116th United States Congress) communicated norms about mask-wearing on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using Twitter data collected in 2020, we found that Republican members of Congress were significantly less likely to promote mask-wearing than Democratic members. We also observed some variations in norm-conforming behaviors a…
Mobilizing Media Attention in the Era of Networked Publics: A Contentious Publicness Framework
Guided by the framework of contentious publicness, this study examines the role of mass media organizations in facilitating digital activism during the 2019–2020 Hong Kong anti-extradition movement. We collected movement tweets targeting media organizations, conceptualized as public-media messages, to identify what media outlets and what narratives were likely to generate more engagement. Findings revealed that activists tended to mobilize media …
The puzzle of misinformation: Exposure to unreliable content in the United States is higher among the better informed
Healthy news consumption requires limited exposure to unreliable content and ideological diversity in the sources consumed. There are two challenges to this normative expectation: the prevalence of unreliable content online; and the prominence of misinformation within individual news diets. Here, we assess these challenges using an observational panel tracking the browsing behavior of N ≈ 140,000 individuals in the United States for 12 months (Ja…
Moral framing and issue-based framing of #StopAsianHate campaigns on Twitter
Guided by moral foundation theory (MFT), this study examines #StopAsianHate messages on Twitter to identify the main narratives surrounding the campaign. It also aims to unpack how moral framing and strategic narratives are related to online engagement size in social justice campaigns. Mixed methods were used to analyze the sampled tweets, including computational approaches based on the extended Moral Foundations Dictionary, structural topic mode…
Moral Foundations, Ideological Divide, and Public Engagement with U.S. Government Agencies’ Covid-19 Vaccine Communication on Social Media
Guided by moral foundation theory, this study examined how moral framing interacted with local constituents' ideological leaning to affect public engagement outcomes of government agencies' COVID-19 vaccine communication on Facebook. We analyzed a dataset of over 5,000 U.S. government agencies' Facebook posts on COVID-19 vaccines in 2021 (N = 70,671), assessed their use of moral language using a newly developed computational method, and examined …
User-Centric Behavioral Tracking: Lessons from Three Case Studies with Do-It-Yourself Computational Pipelines
User-centric behavioral tracking, a cutting-edge computational social science tool, holds tremendous promise for advertising research. The article introduces the technique and presents three do-it-yourself (DIY) case studies in which researchers develop tracking applications and platforms, build infrastructures that host participants, maintain computational pipelines logging user behavior and content exposure, and manage logistical “ins and outs”…
To Share or Not to Share: Examining Social Media in Public Relations Scholarship
Social media has become an indispensable component of everyday life and had a transformative impact on strategic communication. This study reflects on the influence of social media in scholarship and examines social media research to identify strengths, gaps, and assumptions in this body of literature. Using structural topic modeling and network analysis, this research models every word published in six leading journals studying public relations …
Politicization of Science in Covid-19 Vaccine Communication: Comparing US Politicians, Medical Experts, and Government Agencies
We compare the social media discourses on COVID-19 vaccines constructed by U.S. politicians, medical experts, and government agencies, and investigate how various contextual factors influence the likelihood of government agencies politicizing the issue. Taking the political corpus and the medical corpus as two extremes, we propose a language-based definition of politicization of science and measure it on a continuous scale. By building a machine …
Network Analysis in Advertising Research, Reimagined: A Methodological Catalyst for Structural and Institutional Insight
As digital systems increasingly mediate advertising, the field must move beyond message effects to engage with the structural and institutional dynamics that define the advertising ecosystem. This article argues that network analysis—when reimagined beyond its typical application to social media interactions—offers powerful tools for understanding the relationships among brands, consumers, media, influencers, and other intermediaries and stakehol…
Political science (15 works) · Social media (14 works) · Social Media and Politics (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Politics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Public relations (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Ideology (6 works)