Jacob Aron, technology reporter(Image: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex Features )
Researchers comparing Twitter with its Chinese equivalent Sina Weibo have highlighted the ways in which the two social media sites reflect US and Chinese cultural differences.
Computer scientists at Delft University of Technology in Holland and Shanghai Jiaotong University in China gathered 24 million messages from Twitter, where more than 80% of users are from the US, and a further 22 from Sina Weibo, whose users are 95% Chinese.
Classifying messages as referencing either a location, organisation or person, they found that 16 per cent of tweets refer to organisations, while only 3 per cent do on Sina Weibo, as Chinese users avoid mentioning large groups such as political parties. Previous research has shown that Sina Weibo messages on dissenting topics are censored in real-time.
Sina Weibo users are most positive however, with nearly 79 per cent of messages expressing a positive sentiment versus 71 per cent on Twitter. This difference is amplified when discussing people or locations, with Sina Weibo users even more positive and Twitter users more negative.
The analysis also shows that Sina Weibo has failed to penetrate the working week, perhaps because Chinese companies don't see the value of social media, or Chinese workers are less likely to slack off and tweet during the day. Sina Weibo users publish on average 19 per cent more messages per day on the weekend than during the week, while Twitter users average 11 per cent less on the weekend. The researchers will present their work at the User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization conference in Montreal next month