Meet our Researchers: An Interview with Professor Jennifer Pan

It’s been one year since Jennifer Pan officially joined the ranks of SCCEI Faculty and FSI as a Senior Fellow, so we took a few minutes to check in with her and learn more about her journey to becoming a leading scholar on political communication and authoritarian politics and her recent research on information flow into China.

The Journey to Becoming a Researcher

Q: What inspired you to pursue getting a PhD and becoming a professor and researcher?  

A: I left the private sector to start a PhD because I wanted to know whether I could learn something about the world and have confidence in that knowledge. I was interested in improving my understanding of China, having lived and worked there, but I was primarily interested in research methods and methodology. During the PhD, I was working on a paper developing methods of text analysis for Chinese text with Gary King and Margaret “Molly” Roberts. We collected a great deal of Chinese social media data because we needed Chinese text. At some point in this project, we went back to the places where we had originally collected the data and we realized that some of the content had subsequently been censored, which meant we had pre-censored data. This led to several co-authored papers with Gary and Molly on censorship in China, and before I knew it, a research agenda in political communication in non-democratic contexts.

Examining Information Flow in China

Q: Your recent research focuses heavily on the influence and use of social media in China as a tool to shape public opinion. Can you share a bit more about one of your recent studies?

A: In a recent paper, “How Information Flows from the World to China,” coauthored with Yingdan Lu, Jack Schaefer, Kunwoo Park, and Jungseock Joo, we examine whether and how information flows across borders despite government censorship. We develop a semi-automated system that combines deep learning and human annotation to find co- occurring content across different social media platforms and languages. We use this system to detect co-occurring content between Twitter and Sina Weibo as Covid-19 spread globally, and we conduct in-depth investigations of co-occurring content to identify those that constitute an inflow of information from the global information ecosystem into China. We find that approximately one-fourth of content with relevance for China that gains widespread public attention on Twitter makes its way to Weibo. Unsurprisingly, Chinese state-controlled media and commercialized domestic media play a dominant role in facilitating these inflows of information. However, we find that Weibo users without traditional media or government affiliations are also an important mechanism for transmitting information into China. These results imply that while censorship combined with media control provide substantial leeway for the government to set the agenda, social media provides opportunities for non-institutional actors to influence the information environment. 

In terms of policy impact, we are in an era where we are generally pessimistic about the impact of social media. This research, and other work I have done recently, suggest that social media is neither “liberation technology” nor is it the cause of all of society’s problems. Instead, this technology has pro’s and con’s, which affect different communities in different ways.