Contact: Qi Gao, Fabian Abel, Geert-Jan Houben, Yong Yu http://wis.ewi.tudelft.nl - [email protected] Information Propagation Cultures on Sina Weibo and Twitter Qi Gao 1 , Fabian Abel 1 , Geert-Jan Houben 1 , Yong Yu 2 1 Web Information Systems, Delft University of Technology 2 APEX Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University [1] Qi Gao, Fabian Abel, Geert-Jan Houben, Yong Yu. Information Propagation Cultures on Sina Weibo and Twitter. In Proceedings of ACM Web Science Conference 2012. Evanston, USA. June, 2012 [2] Qi Gao, Fabian Abel, Geert-Jan Houben, Yong Yu. A Comparative Study of Users’ Microblogging Behavior on Sina Weibo and Twitter. In Proceedings of 20th International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization. Montréal, Canada. July, 2012 Q1: How quickly do users propagate information on Sina Weibo and Twitter? Twitter users repost messages faster than Sina Weibo Users. Explanation: Twitter users may have the impression that they play an important role in the information propagation process, i.e. they act as if they are in the power of spreading information (power distance). 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% users 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% fraction of positve reposts Weibo Twitter more negative posts more positive posts Q3: What are the sentiment characteristics of messages that people propagate on Sina Weibo and Twitter? Chinese microbloggers have a stronger tendency to propagate positive messages. Explanation: The positive nature of the propagated information on Sina Weibo might point at the long term orientation that is attributed to the Chinese culture. 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% users 0 0.001 0.01 0.1 1 fraction of posts that contain a hashtag Weibo-all posts Weibo-reposts Twitter-all posts Twitter-reposts 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% users 0 0.001 0.01 0.1 1 fraction of posts that contain a URL Weibo-all posts Weibo-reposts Twitter-all posts Twitter-reposts Q2: What are the syntactical characteristics of messages that people propagate on Sina Weibo and Twitter? Users on Twitter seem to be more triggered by hashtags and URLs when propagating information than on Sina Weibo. Explanation: Twitter users seem to be more eager to let their posts appear in the public discussion – possibly a higher demand to profile themselves (individualism). Culture-aware User Modeling and Analysis Cultural Analytics Microblogging Platforms Semantic Web Cultural Models Temporal Analysis Semantic Analysis topic/interest modeling semantic enrichment Syntactic Analysis Sentiment Analysis data acquisition metadata extraction user profile construction multilingual NER 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% users 0 0.1 1 10 100 1000 time distance (in hours) Weibo Twitter Q4: To what extent do the user interests vary between Sina Weibo and Twitter? The topics and concepts users discuss on Sina Weibo differ from Twitter. User interests are broader on Sina Weibo than on Twitter. Explanation: Chinese microblogging behavior follows a rather collectivistic culture - actual content of a message seems to be more important. 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% users 1 10 100 1000 ratio of #reposts to #distinct reposted users Weibo Twitter