Yini Zhang

PhD

Yini Zhang headshot.

Yini Zhang

PhD

Yini Zhang

PhD

Research Topics

Social media; media ecosystem; computational social science

Overview Background Publications

+graduate/undergraduate student co-authors at the time of manuscript preparation

*co-first authors

Jiang, X.+, Zhang, Y., Kim, J.+, Pevehouse, J., & Shah, D. (2023). Talking Past Each Other on Twitter: Thematic, Event, and Temporal Divergences in Polarized Partisan Expression on Immigration. Political Communication. doi: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2263400

Suk, J., Zhang, Y., Yue, Z.+, Wang, R.+, Dong, X.+, Yang, D.+, & Lian, R.+ (2023). When the Personal Becomes Political: Unpacking the Dynamics of Sexual Violence and Gender Justice Discourses across Four Social Media Platforms. Communication Research. doi: 10.1177/0093650223115414

Zhang, Y., Yue, Z.+, Yang, X.+, Chen, F., & Kwak, N. (2022). How a Peripheral Ideology Becomes Mainstream: Strategic Performance, Audience Reaction, and News Media Amplification in the Case of QAnon Twitter Accounts. New Media & Society.

Zhang, Y., Chen, F., & Lukito, J. (2022). Network Amplification of Politicized Information and Misinformation about COVID-19 by Conservative Media and Partisan Influencers on Twitter. Political Communication. doi: 10.1080/10584609.2022.2113844.

Zhang, Y.*, Chen, F.*, & Rohe, K. (2022). Social Media Public Opinion as Flocks in a Murmuration: Conceptualizing and Measuring Opinion Expression on Social Media. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. doi:10.1093/jcmc/zmab021.

Zhang, Y., Shah, D., Valenzuela, S., & Pevehouse, J. (2022). Reactive and Asymmetric Communication Flows: Social Media Discourse and Partisan News Framing in the Wake
of Mass Shootings. The International Journal of Press/Politics. doi: 10.1177/19401612211072793.

Zhang, Y., Lukito J., Su, M.H., Suk, J., Xia, Y., Kim, S.J., Doroshenko, L., & Wells, C. (2021). Assembling the Networks and Audiences of Disinformation: How Successful Russian IRA Twitter Accounts Built Their Followings, 2015–2017. Journal of Communication, 71(2), 305-331. doi: 10.1093/joc/jqaa042

Pelled, A., Lukito, J., Foley, J., Zhang, Y., Sun, Z., Pevehouse, J., & Shah, D. (2021). Death across the news spectrum: A time series analysis of partisan coverage following mass shootings in the U.S. The International Journal of Communication, 15, 20.

Wells, C., Zhang, Y., Lukito, J., & Pevehouse, J. (2020). Modeling the formation of attentive publics in social media: The case of Donald Trump. Mass Communication and Society, 23(2), 181-205. doi:10.1080/15205436.2019.1690664

Chen, F., Zhang, Y., & Rohe, K. (2020). Targeted sampling from massive block model graphs with personalized PageRank. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology), 82(1), 99-126.

Lukito J., Suk, J., Zhang, Y., Doroshenko, L., Kim, S. J., Su, M-H., Xia, Y., Freelon, D., & Wells C. (2020). The Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: How Russia’s Internet Research Agency Tweets Appeared in US News as Vox Populi. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 25(2), 196-216.

Zhang, Y., Shah, D., Foley, J., Abhishek, A., Lukito, J., Suk, J., Kim, S.J., Sun, Z., Pevehouse, J., & Garlough, C. (2019). Whose Lives Matter? Mass Shootings and Social Media Discourses of Sympathy and Policy, 2012-2014. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 24(4), 182-202. doi:10.1093/jcmc/zmz009.

Suk, J., Abhishek, A., Zhang, Y., Ahn, S.Y., Correa, T., Garlough, C., & Shah, D. (2019). #MeToo, Networked Acknowledgement, and Connective Action: How “Empowerment Through Empathy” Launched a Social Movement. Social Science Computer Review, 39(2), 276-294. doi:10.1177/0894439319864882.

Xia, Y., Lukito, J., Zhang, Y., Wells, C., Kim, S., & Tong, C. (2019). Disinformation, performed: Self-presentation of a Russian IRA account on Twitter. Information, Communication and Society, 22(11), 1646-1664. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2019.1621921.

Zhang, Y., Wells, C., Wang, S., & Rohe, K. (2018). Attention and amplification in the hybrid media system: The composition and activity of Donald Trump’s Twitter following during the 2016 presidential election. New Media & Society, 20(9), 3161-3182. doi:10.1177/1461444817744390.