Prof. Christy Mei-kwan CHEUNG

Award Citation

Professor Christy Mei-Kwan Cheung is an internationally recognized scholar with research expertise in technology use and well-being, online deviant behavior, and human information behavior. Her research has been published in top-tier journals in her field and her works are highly cited. The SRFS project led by Professor Cheung will examine cybermobbing on social media, which is an important but under-researched problem that poses threat to individuals and societies. 

Cyberbullying is an important research topic across disciplines. With roots in psychology, education, and public health research, empirical evidence on the social media environment in shaping and preventing cyberbullying remains relatively unexplored. Professor Cheung has pulled together a global research team and proposed the socio-technical perspective to study the collective nature and mechanism of cybermobbing on social media and evaluate technology-based prevention and intervention strategies. The most impactful area for this project is the identification of technical artefacts that would be integrated into the design of social media platforms to discourage the occurrence of cybermobbing behaviors.

A series of studies over the two phases will be conducted. The SRFS project will leverage the team’s expertise in typology research, scenario-based research, fake news detection, and social media analytics. As this is a nascent field internationally, the results from the project will pioneer scientific inquiries in the largely uncharted research territories with far-reaching impacts. In addition, this project will help researchers, platform providers, governments, educators, and parents understand the unique characteristics of cybermobbing in the social media context.