Dr. Heesoo Jang

Assistant Professor

UMass-Amherst

👋 Hi!

I’m an Assistant Professor of Media Law and Ethics in the department of Journalism, University of Massachusetts Amherst. I’m affiliated with the Global Technology for Social Justice Lab (GloTech) and the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). I co-organize the junior tech scholar group with the Public Technology Leadership Collaborative (PTLC).

I study AI for journalism and public communication by analyzing how institutions uphold or evolve their responsibility and democratic accountability in response to AI’s societal impact. My goal is to equip institutions to thoughtfully navigate these challenges, preserving trust and ethical clarity in an AI-inflected era.

Selected Interviews and Mentions

(CNN, 2024) Interview with Jang on martial law in South Korea
(Bloomberg, 2024) The end of passive democracy
(Wired, 2024) Two Upstart Search Engines Are Teaming Up to Take on Google
(The Washington Post, 2024) Americans must prepare for another round of election denial

Opinion pieces

(Zeteo.com, 2024) South Korea: The deeper story behind the unrest
(Bluesky, 2024) South Korea Is Fighting for Democracy Again—And the World Needs to Know
(The Diplomat, 2024) South Korea’s Press Freedom Under Fire
(Tech Policy Press, 2022) Transnational platform ecosystems harm children and women outside the West
(Slate, 2021) AI chatbot systems can harm users in several ways

Education

Ph.D. in Media and Communication

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
M.A. in Communication

Seoul National University, South Korea
B.A. in Media and Mass Communication

Korea University, South Korea
B.B.A in Business Administration

Korea University Business School, South Korea

Blog

So You’re Thinking About Journalism & Law (JOURNAL 445)

Sharing My PhD Statement of Purpose (SOP)

A Comprehensive *Ethics&Law/Journalism* Job Market Material Share

A Comprehensive *Public Relations* Job Market Material Share

A Calendar Guide for the Academic Job Market

Navigating the Academic Job Market with Grace and Grit

Research

An Assessment of Reported Biases and Harms of Large Language Models

This study analyzes how biases and harms are reported in large language model documentation, highlighting the need for interdisciplinary collaboration to address ethical issues and improve mitigation efforts in AI. It received the Top Paper Award.

Heesoo Jang, Jaemin Cho

Safeguarding the Peaceful Transfer of Power: Pro-Democracy Electoral Frames and Journalist Coverage of Election Deniers During the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections

Published in the International Journal of Press/Politics. How should journalists cover election denialism? And, how do they? We propose a new standard of “democracy-framed electoral coverage” and evaluate press coverage of the 2022 US midterms.

Heesoo Jang, Daniel Kreiss

South Korea’s Press Freedom Under Fire

Published in The Diplomat. South Korea is on the brink of one of its most critical elections, amid an intensifying assault on press freedom.

Heesoo Jang

Social Media Policy in Two Dimensions

Published open access in journal Information, Communication, & Society. We investigate what drives Americans’ opinions on whether the government, platforms, or individual users should be responsible for social media content using data from a nationally representative survey of over 10,000 Americans.

Heesoo Jang, Bridget Barrett, Shannon C. McGregor

Tech Companies Sit on Sidelines While Korean Children Are Drawn Into Digital Sex Trafficking

Published in the Tech Policy Press. A mass sex trafficking crime that happened in South Korea was only possible with the use of the combined affordances of several Internet platforms and cloud storage providers, the majority of which are headquartered in the West.

Heesoo Jang

Tech Companies Sit on Sidelines While Korean Children Are Drawn Into Digital Sex Trafficking

Introducing the Co-oriented Scansis (CoS) model: A case of chatbot, Lee-Luda

Published in Public Relations Review. We propose a new model that explains the gap between how AI companies and the public understand organizational crises caused by AI systems. How does a crisis of an AI company become scandalized? We use the case of a South Korean AI company, Scatterlab, to answer this question.

Heesoo Jang, Suman Lee

Introducing the Co-oriented Scansis (CoS) model: A case of chatbot, Lee-Luda

A South Korean Chatbot Shows Just How Sloppy Tech Companies Can Be With User Data

Published in Slate Future Tense. A recent incident of personal data misuse in South Korea provides us a clear picture of what can go wrong, and how consumers can fight back.

Heesoo Jang