PhD student @USCAnnenberg
Zituo WANG 王子托
I research digital technology, social justice, and disadvantaged communities within both health and political contexts. I am interested in the underlying mechanisms that produce public opinion and the social networks that mobilize collective expression, particularly how these dynamics are shaped by politics and artificial intelligence. By employing computational methods like natural language processing and computer vision, I want to address existing challenges in multilingual, multimodal, and multiplatform studies.
Zituo’s
Recent research
To understand social reality from marginalized perspectives, interrogate institutional norms and practices that perpetuate oppression, and deconstruct widely accepted or neutral systems in the larger society (Lather, 1991).
Cross-platform info flow
.
In June 2022, a group of men attacked four women at a restaurant in the Chinese city of Tangshan. This study investigated public opinions on Weibo and X in Chinese and English by employing multilingual analysis. Another study explored affective polarization between female and male social media users.
To live with it or not?
.
This study conducted a nationwide survey (N = 665) to examine the cultivation effect of state media on the audience’s support for the zero-COVID policy. Results show that the more state media people were exposed to on social media, the more they supported the zero-COVID policy. The fear of the virus and trust in the government both acted as variables that mediated the effect.
Justice for Birdy
.
On September 10, 2022, Gao Yan, a TikTok influencer known as “Birdy,” tragically took his own life after experiencing school bullying due to his sexual orientation. This study conducted a multimodal analysis of 102,031 videos to explore different strategies adopted by TikTok users to call for justice.
Zituo WANG