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Article History

Received: 28 March 2024

Accepted: 20 August 2025

First Online: 28 August 2025

Competing interests

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: The research has been approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee, the University of Hong Kong, with the approval number: EA1809010, and the date of issuance is 31 March 2020. The research was conducted in full accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The ethical review process at the University of Hong Kong covered all aspects of the research, including the recruitment of informants, data handling, the dissemination of outputs, and the management of data after publication. The research protocol was reviewed in full, including methods of obtaining consent, consent forms, survey instruments, and interview outlines. It is an HKU policy that for informants who cannot be identifiable at the individual level during the research process, consent can be exempted. The practice of the research was therefore in full accordance with data protection law in Hong Kong and the institutional policy, as data collection did not collect any personal identifier (in fact, neither is it allowed by Twitter, or X as currently named, to download identifiers of users).

: Consent was exempted for the research because it did not involve human participants who could be identifiable by the researchers. See detailed clarification above.