Fan Yang is a PhD candidate at School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University. She researches the effects of large-scale international social media platforms in terms of cross-jurisdictional tensions and expectations, and their cross-border effects on political activity and identity.
Her PhD thesis explores WeChat Official Accounts in Australia, which is an information broadcasting function on WeChat/Weixin used to produce news and information for Chinese migrant communities in Australia. She studies this through interviews and ethnographic observation with production teams that generate native content for those platforms, particularly observing decision-making and self-management in this context.
Her research also includes the globalisation of non-Western technologies and social media platforms, smart cities and surveillance and information privacy.