It is widely known that the use of the Internet for public expression in China is regulated by the Chinese government. Though scholars have studied China censorship, given the challenges of data collection on such research, only a small number of China online expression studies were conducted based on large quantities of empirical evidence. We thus develop the WeChatscope system to collect data from a list of WeChat public accounts. Following its sister project Weiboscope (Fu et. al, 2013), Wechatscope aims to extend the systematic and scalable approach of data collection and “big data” analytics to Wechat public account. This talk will introduce this project and discuss how it help us understand the role of the Chinese social media in content distribution, user engagement, platform intervention, and connectivity enabled by the Technology.

Dr. King-wa Fu: Dr. King-wa Fu is an Associate Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC), The University of Hong Kong. His research interests cover political participation and media use, computational media studies, health and the media, and younger generation's Internet use. He was a visiting Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and Fulbright-RGC Hong Kong Senior Research Scholar in 2016-2017. He has a PhD from the JMSC, a master’s degree in Social Sciences and a MPhil in Engineering. He was a journalist at the Hong Kong Economic Journal before turning to academia.