Professor Xinzhi ZHANG 張昕之

Prof. Xinzhi Zhang's expertise includes digital journalism, political communication, AI ethics, and computational social science. He studies how AI and digital platforms are reshaping news production, public engagement, and policymaking. His research aims to empower citizens to engage in informed conversations and support the development of communication policies and interventions that foster innovation, productivity, and epistemic integrity.

Prof. Zhang has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, including Human Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Social Media + Society, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, International Journal of Press/Politics, Information, Communication & Society, Policy & Internet, and Digital Journalism. He has been awarded four grants by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC), including three General Research Fund (GRF) grants and one Collaborative Research Fund (CRF, as Co-PI), as well as one grant under the Public Policy Research Scheme (PPR) of the Hong Kong SAR Government.

Before joining CityUHK in 2024, Prof. Zhang was a tenured Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU), where he served as the founding Programme Director of the Master of Science in AI and Digital Media, a pioneering postgraduate program of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region, supported by the University Grants Committee's (UGC) Targeted Taught Postgraduate Programmes Fellowships Scheme. He also spearheaded the establishment of Hong Kong's first data journalism undergraduate program, the Data and Media Communication Concentration at HKBU, in collaboration with faculty from Journalism and Computer Science. He received the HKBU Award for Outstanding Young Researchers (2021) and the HKBU Award for Outstanding Performance in Teaching (2022). He was a visiting scholar at the Department of Communication, University of California at Davis, in 2022.

Prof. Zhang currently serves on the Editorial Boards of five top journals in media and communication, i.e., Communication Research, Human Communication Research, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Digital Journalism, and Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. He was a guest editor for Global Media and China (Sage/IAMCR).

He is an active columnist for local and international media outlets, including Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), Hong Kong Economic Journal, and FTChinese (the Chinese edition of the Financial Times). His perspectives on AI-powered media innovation and information integrity have been featured in major news media, including Channel News Asia (Singapore), Nikkei Asia (Japan), and Phoenix TV (Hong Kong).

• I am looking for PhD students in the 2027 entry to work on digital journalism, political communication, and the social impacts of tech-mediated human communication (especially content production and dissemination involving GenAI and social media), using experimental design and computational methods. If you are interested in working with me, please email me your CV and credentials. You are encouraged to apply for the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS) under my supervision in the 2027/28 entry.

• Generative AI for Multimedia Authoring
• AI and Digital Marketing for Entrepreneurship
• Human-AI Communication Workshop
  
• AI Law, Ethics, and Regulation

• 2026 - present. Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI), Collective Research Fund (CRF), the Research Grants Council (RGC), Hong Kong SAR. Understanding & Fighting Scams: Psychological and Social Perspectives & Effective Interventions. [5,900,000 HKD]. On-going.
• 2024 – 2026. Co-Investigator (Co-I), General Research Fund (GRF), the Research Grants Council (RGC), Hong Kong SAR. How Does Censorship Drive Conspiratorial Beliefs? The Roles of Information Uncertainty and Motivated Reasoning. [411,855 HKD]. On-going.
• 2021 – 2022. Principal Investigator (PI), Public Policy Research Funding Scheme (PPR) from the Government of the Hong Kong SAR, Hong Kong Media’s Coverage of Political Polarization and its Effects on People’s Political Attitudes and Behaviors. [356,972 HKD]. Completed.
• 2020 – 2023. Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI). The Interdisciplinary Research Clusters Matching Scheme (IRCMS) by the University Research Clusters, Hong Kong Baptist University. Engaging the Audience with AI-powered News Chatbots: Developing and Evaluating a Critiquing-oriented Conversational Recommender System for Digital News. [937,500 HKD]. Completed.
• 2020 – 2022. Principal Investigator (PI), General Research Fund (GRF), the Research Grants Council (RGC), Hong Kong SAR. Why Fact-Checking Fails? Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Corrective Messages Countering Misinformation on Social Media: A Comparison of Hong Kong, the United States, and the Netherlands. [408,256 HKD]. Completed.
• 2019 – 2021. Principal Investigator (PI). General Research Fund (GRF), the Research Grants Council (RGC), Hong Kong SAR. The Making and Unmaking of the Public Sphere: Outcomes of Political Disagreement, Expression Avoidance, and a Filtered Information Repertoire. [445,520 HKD] Completed.

• Zhang, X., Huang, W., & Zhu, J. J. H. (2026). How journalism researchers navigate the AI hype: research orientations and intervention recommendations. Information, Communication & Society. 29(1), 1-20. [Top 9% (18th/first 200) in Scopus - Communication, Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd.]
• Wei, R., Guo, J., Zhang, X., & Lo, V.-H. (2026). Hostile media and friendly chambers: Social media polarization and the 2024 U.S. campus protests. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. [Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd.]
• Wei, R., Pu, J., Lo, V.-H., & Zhang, X. (2026). The (un)desirable shield: Consequences of perceived effects of warning labels on AI-generated political disinformation. Information, Communication & Society. Online first. [Top 9% (18th/first 200) in Scopus - Communication, Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd.]
• Huang, W., Wu, Yang., Skoric, M., & Zhang, X. (2025). Normalizing platform logic: Motives, strategies and risks of news professionals’ traffic-oriented practices on social media in Greater China. Journalism. Online first. doi: 10.1177/14648849251398655. [Top 11% (22th/first 200) in Scopus - Arts and Humanities, Sage Publications Ltd.]
• Pu, J. & Zhang, X. (2025). Source and message effects on reactance to conflict reporting: Evidence from Hong Kong. Journalism Practice. Online first. doi: 10.1080/17512786.2025.2545450. [Top 24% (48th/first 200) in Scopus - Communication, Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd.]
• Pu, J. & Zhang, X. (2025). Coding OpenAI in an open-sourced code sharing platform: Exploring the collective collaboration on ChatGPT projects on GitHub. Human Machine Communication. Online first. [Top 25% (49th/first 200) in Scopus - Social Sciences, Communication and Social Robotics Labs.]
• Zhang, X., Kim, H. K., & Zhou, S. (2025). Time versus timing in social cognition: How concurrent viewer cues and plot-aligned danmaku affect narrative outcomes on online video platforms. Computers in Human Behavior. Online first. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2025.108748. [Top 1% (1st/first 200) in Scopus - Arts and Humanities, Elsevier.]
• Zhang, X. (2025). Politically motivated retroactive self-censorship on social media: Managing political impression in a politically polarized environment. Mass Communication & Society. Online first. doi: 10.1080/15205436.2025.2515216. [Top 31% (62nd/first 200) in Scopus - Communication. Taylor & Francis Ltd.]
  
• Zhang, X., Peng, T.-Q., & Zhu, Q. (2025). Social media misinformation wars: How message features, political cynicism, and conspiracy beliefs shape government-led public health debunking effectiveness. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. Online first. doi: 10.1177/10776990251334107. [Top 21% (41st/first 200) in Scopus - Communication. Sage Publications Ltd.]
• Zhang, X. & Lu, F. (2025). Enhancing public health policy communication through government-citizen social media interactions: The impact of replying agents, inquiry tone, and institutional trust. Policy & Internet. Online first. doi: 10.1002/poi3.70000. [top 8% (16th/first 200) in Scopus - Public Administration, Wiley.]
• Zhu, Q., Peng, T.-Q., & Zhang, X. (2025). How do individual and societal factors shape news authentication? Comparing misinformation resilience across Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and the United States. International Journal of Press/Politics. Online first. doi: 10.1177/19401612251318838. [top 5% (9th/first 200) in Scopus - Communication, Sage Publications Ltd.]
• Xue, H., Zhang, J., & Zhang, X. (2025). Facts or feelings? Leveraging emotionality as a fact-checking strategy on social media in the United States. Social Media + Society. Online first. doi: 10.1177/20563051251318172. [top 13% (26th/first 200) in Scopus - Communication, Sage Publications Ltd.]
• Wang, C.-J., Zhang, X., Gou, Z., & Wu, Y. (2024). Yesterday once more: Collective storytelling and public engagement with digital cultural products on the music streaming platform. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. 11, 1173. doi: 10.1057/s41599-024-03636-8. [top 1% (2nd/first 200) in Scopus - General Arts and Humanities, Springer Nature Limited.]
• Zhang, X., Zhu, R., Chen, L., Zhang, Z., & Chen, M. (2024). News from Messenger? A cross-national comparative study of news media’s audience engagement strategies via Facebook Messenger chatbots. Digital Journalism, 12(3), 336-355. doi: 10.1080/21670811.2022.2145329. [Q1 (top 5%) in SSCI - Communication, 2021 JCR IF = 6.847, Sage Publications Ltd.]
• Zhang, X. (2023). Will political disagreement silence political expression? The role of information repertoire filtration and discussion network heterogeneity. Human Communication Research, 49(2), 139-148. doi: 10.1093/hcr/hqad009. [Q1 (top 12%) in SSCI - Communication, 2021 JCR IF = 5.333, Oxford University Press.]
• Zhu, R. & Zhang, X. (2023). Public sector’s misinformation debunking during the public health campaign: A case of Hong Kong. Health Promotion International. Online first. doi: 10.1093/heapro/daad053. [Q1 in SSCI - Health Policy & Services, 2021 JCR IF = 3.734, Oxford University Press.]
  
• Zhang, X. (2022). Expression avoidance and privacy management as dissonance reduction in the face of online disagreement. Telematics and Informatics. Online first. doi: 10.1016/j.tele.2022.101894. [Q1 (top 5%) in SSCI - Information Science and Library Science, 2021 JCR IF = 9.14, Elsevier.]
• Zhang, X., Lin, W.-Y., & Dutton, W. H. (2022). The political consequences of online disagreement: The filtering of communication networks in a polarized political context. Social Media + Society. Online first, doi: 10.1177/20563051221114391. [Q1 (top 15%) in SSCI - Communication, 2021 JCR IF = 4.636, Sage Publications Ltd.]
  
• Zhang, X. & Ho, J. C. F. (2022). Exploring the fragmentation of the representation of data-driven journalism in the Twittersphere: A network analytics approach. Social Science Computer Review. 40(1), 42-60. doi: 10.1177/0894439320905522. [Q1 (top 13%) in SSCI - Social Science Interdisciplinary, 2019 JCR IF = 2.696, Sage Publications Ltd.]
• Zhang, X. & Zhu, R. (2022). How source-level and message-level factors influence journalists’ social media visibility during a public health crisis. Journalism, 23(12), 2627-2645. doi: 10.1177/14648849211023153. [Q1 (top 16%) in SSCI - Communication, 2020 JCR IF = 4.436, Sage Publications Ltd.]
• Liang, H. & Zhang, X. (2021). Partisan bias of perceived incivility and its political consequences: Evidence from survey experiments in Hong Kong. Journal of Communication, 71(3), 357-379. doi: 10.1093/joc/jqab008. [Q1 (top 6%) in SSCI - Communication, 2020 JCR IF = 7.270, Oxford University Press.]
• Zhang, X. (2021). Innovation and conformity in music reproduction: A network analytic approach to contestants’ song covering in reality shows in Mainland China and the US. International Communication Gazette. 83(7), 639-661. doi: 10.1177/17480485211014372. [SSCI - Communication, 2020 JCR IF = 1.859, Sage Publications Ltd.]
• Zhang, X. & Zhong, Z.-J. (2020). Extending media system dependency theory to informational media use and environmentalism: A cross-national study. Telematics & Informatics. 50. doi: 10.1016/j.tele.2020.101378. [Q1 (top 12%) in SSCI – Information Science and Library Science, 2019 JCR IF = 4.139, Elsevier.]
• Zhang, X. (2020). Effects of freedom restoration, language variety, and issue type on psychological reactance. Health Communication. 35(11), 1316-1327. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2019.1631565. (Q2 in SSCI - Communication, 2018 JCR IF = 1.846, Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd).
• Zhang, X. & Lin, W.-Y. (2018). Hanging together or not? Impacts of social media use and organisational membership on individual and collective political actions. International Political Science Review, 39(2), 273-289. doi: 10.1177/0192512116641842. (Q2 (top 33%) in SSCI – Political Science, 2017 JCR IF = 1.321, Sage Publications Ltd., the flagship journal of the International Political Science Association (IPSA), ranked 6th in the “Top read articles in 2018” published by the journal)
• Zhang, X. (2018). Visualization, technologies, or the public? Exploring the articulation of data-driven journalism in the Twittersphere. Digital Journalism. 6(6), 737-758. doi: 10.1080/21670811.2017.1340094. (Q1 (top 18.2%) in SSCI - Communication, 2018 JCR IF = 2.679, Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd.)
• Zhang, X. & Lin, W.-Y. (2018). Stoking the fires of participation: Extending the Gamson hypothesis on social media use and elite-challenging political engagement. Computers in Human Behavior, 79, 217-226. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2017.10.036. [Q1 (top 12%) in SSCI – Psychology (multidisciplinary), 2017 JCR IF = 3.536, Elsevier.]

• 2026 - present. Editorial Board Member, Communication Research (Sage, top 2% Scopus - Communication)
  
• 2025 - present. Columnist, FT Chinese, the Chinese edition of Financial Times (UK)
• 2025 - present. Editorial Board Member, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ) (Sage, the flagship journal of the AEJMC)
• 2025 - present. Editorial Board Member, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (Taylor & Francis, the flagship journal of the BEA)
• 2024 - present. Editorial Board Member, Human Communication Research (HCR) (Oxford University Press, the flagship journal of the ICA)
• 2022 - present. Editorial Board Member, Digital Journalism (Taylor & Francis, top 6% Scopus - Communication)
• 2024 - present. Member, College Research Committee (CRC), College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS), City University of Hong Kong
• 2024 - present. Director of Research, Department of Media and Communication (COM), City University of Hong Kong