SERDANG - Prof. Dr. Ezhar Tamam and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Moniza Waheed of the Department of Communication, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, as well as Assoc. Prof. Dr Azreen Azman of the Department of Multimedia, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, have won the highly competitive Facebook Integrity Foundational Research Award of USD25,000 for their proposal, “Understanding Reaction to Emotion-Elicit Provocative News among Malaysians”.
Facebook Research Awards are structured as unrestricted monetary awards that provide funding for innovative and compelling research proposals that have the potential to significantly advance knowledge in areas of mutual interest. Results of the winning research proposals for the awards span India, the United Kingdom, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Pakistan, Brazil, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, South Africa, Austria, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, and the United States.
The announcement of the winning proposals has been published on Facebook’s website (https://research.fb.com/programs/research-awards/proposals/integrity-foundational-research-awards/#Winning_Proposals).
UPM’s team will study the growing phenomenon of threats and the prevalence of problematic news on social media platforms. There is a lack of understanding on how people react to emotion-elicit provocative news on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. Among the questions that the study intends to answer include whether reaction varies by need for cognition, perception of social context regarding provocative news, perceived salience of the news, and the age (youths - 35 years and below, and adults - 35 years and above) of social media users. It will also study whether the above relationships are moderated by motivational values.
The study will yield an integrative theoretical model on individual and social predictors as well as the role of motivational values as a moderator towards Malaysians’ reactions to emotion-elicit provocative news.
Findings from this study will be useful for social media news literacy skills as well as the development of intervention programmes to promote effective peer-to-peer information behaviour and to curb the threat and proliferation of provocative news and postings on social media.
Prof. Dr. Ezhar Tamam, the principal researcher, has also been invited by Facebook to attend a workshop in Menlo Park, California in 2019 to share the findings of the research. - UPM
