Accomplishments

Four faculty members from the School of Communication have secured the 2025/2026 General Research Fund (GRF) from the Research Grants Council (RGC) for their research projects which contribute to advancing knowledge in areas such as social media use, hate speech, misinformation, fact-checking, and emerging technology in youth development.

Professor Dominic Yeo, Associate Head of the Department of Communication Studies, secured the GRF grant for his collaborative project titled, “Temporal Dynamics of Young People's Social Media Use and Well-Being: A Continuous Time Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Research.” His project aims to map out the time effects of social media use on youth mental health. Details 

Professor Sai Wang, Assistant Professor, Department of Interactive Media, secured the GRF grant for her collaborative project titled, “Does a Picture Hurt More Than a Thousand Words? A Systematic Examination of Multimodal Hate Speech in Hong Kong.” Her project aims to examine how exposure to multimodal hate speech on social media, compared to purely textual forms, impacts short and long-term levels of prejudice and discriminatory behaviour.

Professor Ivan Li, Assistant Professor, Department of Interactive Media, secured the GRF grant for his project titled, “Truth on Air: Combating Misinformation in Streaming Videos with Multimodal Fact-Checking.” His project seeks to advance a trustworthy digital future by tackling untrustworthy information through comprehensive multimodal fact-checking for streaming videos.

Professor Kenny Chow, Head and Associate Professor in the Department of Interactive Media, secured the GRF grant for his project titled “Investigating the Effect of Mixed-reality Travelogue Creation in Promoting Youth’s Positive Character Development.” His project will be a generative and exploratory study, aiming to investigate the possibility of engaging young people in exploring the real world, and to examine the effects of mixed-reality travelogue creation on their curiosity about the real world, their ability to imagine being in different situations, and their capacity to adopt different perspectives.