Shengchun Huang (Ph.D. '25)
Dissertation: “Illusions of Echo Chambers: (Mis)perceptions about Personalized News Environments and Political Consequences”
When 2025 Ph.D. graduate Shengchun Huang arrived at Annenberg, she brought with her a journalist’s instinct for storytelling and a growing curiosity about the hidden forces shaping the stories people see.
Now, she leaves with a new framework for understanding how algorithms shape our digital news consumption and how perceptions of our personal news diets might affect democracy itself.
Huang, who grew up in Beijing, China, didn’t plan to be an academic; she wanted to be a reporter. “I liked investigating questions and figuring out how things worked,” she said. After earning a B.A. in communication from Renmin University and an M.A. in journalism and communication from Tsinghua University, she began working as a journalist. But she soon found herself frustrated with the pace.
“When I worked in journalism, I was not satisfied with the production process,” she recalled. “We always had a deadline. And sometimes I would think to myself, ‘Okay, there’s still something I’m not sure about in the evidence I’ve accumulated.’ But I had to write the story anyway.”
A mentor at the newspaper noticed her frustration and encouraged her to consider a Ph.D. program, where she could explore complex questions with more time and depth.
Around that time, a new app called Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, was surging in popularity. Huang was struck by how the platform changed the way news was delivered. “It overturned the logic of traditional journalism,” she said. “Instead of editors curating the news, algorithms created personalized timelines for every user. That’s when I realized how powerful algorithms could be.”
She was drawn to study at Annenberg to learn from scholars already diving into how algorithms affect news, politics and polarization. “When I looked into Annenberg, I not only heard about the rich theoretical foundation built by pioneers in communication, but also respected their spirit of pursuing scientific knowledge rigorously,” she said. “I was nurtured here. I grew as a scholar.”
Her dissertation introduces a new theoretical concept: the perceptions of personalized news environments. It explores how people perceive both their own algorithm-driven media bubbles and those of others — and how those perceptions might shape political attitudes and social trust.
“We know that people think media is biased,” Huang said. “But I want to push further: we also have perceptions of the ‘overall media environment’ we live in. Each of us lives in a siloed media space shaped by our preferences and by algorithms. I want to understand how people perceive those environments — both their own and others’ — and how that affects things like political polarization and partisan hostility.”
In August 2025, after completing her degree at Annenberg, Huang started a new chapter as a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
