Trend Dynamics and Attention in Chinese Social Media

We analyzed the temporal aspect of trends and trend-setters in Sina Weibo, contrasting it with earlier observations of Twitter. We found a vast difference in the content shared in China as compared with a global social network such as Twitter. In China, the trends are created almost entirely due to the retweets of media content such as jokes, images, and videos, unlike Twitter where trends have more to do with current global events and news stories. On closer inspection, we observed that most trends in Sina Weibo are due to the continuous retweets of a small percentage of fraudulent accounts, set up to artificially inflate certain posts. This reveals evidence of an “Internet Water Army,” a unique promotional method deployed by public relations companies in China to influence the popular dissemination of information in online social networks.