News

The article, "Going beyond affective polarization: How emotions and identities are used in anti-vaccination TikTok videos," was published in Political Communication. This paper investigates how emotional appeals and identity cues in a multi-modal form are embedded in TikTok anti-vaccination videos. 

Kim, S. J., Villanueva, I., & Chen, K.* (2023). Going Beyond Affective Polarization: How Emotions and Identities are Used in Anti-Vaccination TikTok Videos. Political Communication, 1-22. (doi)

I presented the poster "The Consequences of Partisan Prejudice: The Role of Affective Polarization and Partisan Moral Prejudice in Inter-Partisan Communication" at the AEJMC conference. The paper examines why people are reluctant to initiate cross-partisan conversations.

I delivered the talk, "Navigating ethical boundaries of scraping and analyzing social media data," at UW-Madison Computational Communication Cooperative. I discussed how ethical and legal considerations should be made in collecting and validating data from social media platforms.  

At the AEJMC conference Communication Theory and Methods session, I presented "Application of signal detection theory in misinformation research." This research delves into operationalization and design issues in misinformation experiments in communication research.

Kim, S. J., & Brauer, M. Application of signal detection theory in misinformation research.

I became a student liaison at the Communication Theory and Methods Division at AEJMC. I will serve as a contact point for graduate students in the field who are advancing communication theories and methods.

Our election debate/election fraud team received a top paper award in the computational methods division for a paper, "Building a Multimodal Classifier of Aggressive Political Style". This paper, which I co-authored, emphasizes the importance of considering multi-modality when capturing aggressive performances of presidential candidates in election debates.  

Shah, D., Sun, Z.,* Bucy, E. P., Kim, S. J., Sun, Y., Li, M., Sethars, W. Building a multimodal classifier of aggressive political style: Towards a computational understanding of political performance in a populist era.

At the ICA conference Computational Methods division panel, "Video as Data", I presented how multi-modal emotion expressions and multi-dimensional identity expressions appear in anti-vaccination TikTok videos in English and in other languages. This research demonstrates why it is important to analyze emotional frames in videos in multi-modal forms. Also, this research emphasizes investigating numerous forms of sociopolitical identities anti-vaxxers target to persuade audiences, including maternal identities and conspiratorial identities.

Kim, S. J., Villanueva, I., & Chen, K. Going beyond affective polarization: How emotional and identity cues are used in anti-vaccination conspiracies on TikTok in various countries.

At the ICA conference Communication and Technology poster session, I presented "Where we share one, we. share all: Cross-platform link sharing patterns in QAnon discourse on Facebook and Paler amid Deplatforming". This research delves into cross-platform analysis and demonstrates why examining both links and main posts associated with links is important, and portrays a different picture when investigating cross-platform link sharing patterns.

Kim, S. J., Yang, Y., Lukito, J., Borah, P., & Foley, J. M.Where we share one, we share all: Cross-platform link sharing patterns in QAnon discourse on Facebook and Parler amid de-platforming.

At the ICA pre-conference (session titled "Is there still a crisis of public communication? A tribute to Jay Blumler"), I presented a poster with Yibing Sun on research asking "Does candidate aggression motivate online incivility? Gender, partisanship, and populist performance". This research applies a multi-modal classifier detecting markers capturing presidential candidates' aggressive behaviors in debates and examines if these behaviors induce citizens' uncivil responses on social media. 

Kim, S. J., Sun, Y.*, Duan, Z., Suh, Y., Fan, R., Li, M., Bucy, E., Borah, P., Lukito, J., Sun, Z., Shah, D. Does candidate aggression motivate online incivility? Gender, partisanship, and populist performance.

The article on visual framing of science conspiracy video that I worked with Kaiping Chen, Qiantong Gao, and Sebastian Raschka is published in a Computational Communication Research Special Issue, "Image as Data". This paper emphasizes the role of visual framing in examining conspiracy videos, and why it is important to conduct a multi-modal analysis to understand video features on social media.  

Visual Framing of Science Conspiracy Videos: Integrating Machine Learning with Communication Theories to Study the Use of Color and Brightness (2022). Computational Communication Research. (pdf)

The extensive review article on experimental framing effects research that I worked with Doug M. McLeod, Hyesun Chung, Min-Hsin Su, Ran Tao, Jiawei Liu, and ByungGu Lee is finally out!

This review introduces a conceptual framework with three elements to highlight the richness of the framing effects literature while providing structure to address its fragmented nature. Through the conceptual framework, we make the case for revitalizing framing effects research.

Navigating a Diverse Paradigm: A Conceptual Framework for Experimental Framing Effects Research (2022). Review of Communication Research. (pdf)

The digital data conference I co-organized with Jo Lukito, Yunkang Yang, Jordan Foley, and Ross Dalke took place virtually from April 14 to 15. The digital media conference brought together researchers collecting and analyzing digital media data to discuss the practice and ethics of digital data research. 

Day 1 of the conference featured a keynote on the state of digital data research and a panel on emerging digital data tools. Day 2 focused on data ethics.

The conference was co-hosted by the Center for Media Engagement and funded by the Social Science Research Council. (panel discussions and keynote recordings) 

I presented at the Midwest Political Science Association our research on multi-modal emotion expressions and multi-dimensional identity expressions in TikTok anti-vaccination videos, co-authored with Isabel Villanueva and Kaiping Chen. 

Kim, S. J., Villanueva, I., & Chen, K. Going beyond affective polarization: How emotional and identity cues are used in anti-vaccination conspiracies on TikTok in various countries.

Conservative dilemma workshop took place held by the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics (IDDP) at the George Washington University and the Social Science Research Council' (SSRC)s Media & Democracy program. The focal topic of our discussion was how QAnon could serve as a digital surrogate in the United States.

Lukito, J., Yang, Y., & Kim, S. J. How QAnon developed from a fringe group to a digital surrogate for the GOP.