Characteristics of information spreading across nations

Abstract

The mechanism of information diffusion on social media platforms such as retweeting in Twitter has been largely studied. Existing studies mainly look into the social or discursive features of information that are popular in virtual space, few have related the diffusion of information to the real‐world context and studied the characteristics of information that can spread across nations. In the context of globalization, understanding information spreading across nations not only facilitates marketing and propagation but also helps to understand transnational activities such as transnational social movements. We conduct a preliminary study to analyze the sentiment and cognition components of tweets that disseminate transnationally in the MeToo movement. Tweets that spread across nations are generally popular, that is retweeted more. However, popular tweets do not always spread across nations. We find popular tweets that disseminate transnationally contain more elements of politics, religion, or social bond indicators. Our study provides insights for propagation in globalization and may help social movement organizations that aim for transnational activities.