What are Chinese Talking about in Hot Weibos?
Yuan Li, Haoyu Gao, Mingmin Yang, Wanqiu Guan, Haixin Ma, Weining, Qian, Zhigang Cao, Xiaoguang Yang

TL;DR
This study analyzes 650 million weibos from SinaWeibo to classify hot topics, revealing societal insights and user behavior patterns influenced by identity factors and regional differences.
Contribution
It provides a large-scale classification of hot weibos and explores how user identities and regional factors influence posting and reposting behaviors.
Findings
Hot weibos mainly fall into eight categories, with Leisure & Mood and Social Events dominating.
Verified users contribute nearly half of hot weibos despite being a tiny fraction of users.
User behaviors vary significantly across regions, reflecting local cultures.
Abstract
SinaWeibo is a Twitter-like social network service emerging in China in recent years. People can post weibos (microblogs) and communicate with others on it. Based on a dataset of 650 million weibos from August 2009 to January 2012 crawled from APIs of SinaWeibo, we study the hot ones that have been reposted for at least 1000 times. We find that hot weibos can be roughly classified into eight categories, i.e. Entertainment & Fashion, Hot Social Events, Leisure & Mood, Life & Health, Seeking for Help, Sales Promotion, Fengshui & Fortune and Deleted Weibos. In particular, Leisure & Mood and Hot Social Events account for almost 65% of all the hot weibos. This reflects very well the fundamental dual-structure of the current society of China: On the one hand, economy has made a great progress and quite a part of people are now living a relatively prosperous and fairly easy life. On the other…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSocial Media and Politics · Complex Network Analysis Techniques · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence
