Joseph Jai-sung Yoo is a fellow with Ranking Digital Rights in New America's Open Technology Institute. He is a Ph.D candidate in School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his B.A. in Kyung Hee University, South Korea in 2010 and M.A. in the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. He worked as a newspaper reporter for JoongAng Daily Newspaper and Maeil Business Newspaper companies from 2008 to 2010 in South Korea.
He has academic research interests in political communication on social media, net neutrality policy, sports communication, and network analysis, especially how to establish causal relationship among nodes in social media networks. He has studied the theoretical combination of the two-step flow of information and agenda setting. His dissertation will identify opinion leaders in the Twitter issue network and examine longitudinal directions of information flow initiated by such opinion leaders to determine whether information flows on Twitter issue networks are top down (from news media to opinion leaders to the public), bottom up (from the public to opinion leaders to news media), or mixed processes. He also analyzes statistical data using R, Python, AMOS, and SAS.
Telecommunications policy, especially net neutrality and the pricing of triple play packages provided by internet service providers, is another research interest. He wrote an academic paper analyzing the relationship between ownership status of broadcast media outlets and the coverage of net neutrality. These days, he wishes to measure public sentiment on Twitter toward net neutrality by using big data analysis after the election of Donald Trump.
He has worked for Telecommunication and Information Policy Institute in the University of Texas at Austin and participated in various research activities and forums.