What Trends in Chinese Social Media

TL;DR

This paper compares trending topics on Chinese social media Sina Weibo with Twitter, revealing distinct content patterns: media retweets dominate Weibo trends, while global news influences Twitter trends.

Contribution

It provides the first comparative analysis of Sina Weibo and Twitter trending topics, highlighting cultural and content differences in social media trends.

Findings

Weibo trends are driven mainly by media content retweets.

Twitter trends focus more on global news and current events.

Distinct content sharing behaviors are observed between the platforms.

Abstract

There has been a tremendous rise in the growth of online social networks all over the world in recent times. While some networks like Twitter and Facebook have been well documented, the popular Chinese microblogging social network Sina Weibo has not been studied. In this work, we examine the key topics that trend on Sina Weibo and contrast them with our observations on Twitter. We find that there is a vast difference in the content shared in China, when compared to a global social network such as Twitter. In China, the trends are created almost entirely due to retweets of media content such as jokes, images and videos, whereas on Twitter, the trends tend to have more to do with current global events and news stories.