Differences in Social Media Usage Exist Between Western and Middle-East Countries

Anonymous Hyperlocal Communities: What do they talk about?

“…Karma describes the accumulated vote score between upand downvotes. As can be seen in Figure 5a, Jodel Karma is longtailed to positive votes, whereas disliked posts naturally fall off around the post-remove-threshold [19]. We identify higher scores, indicating appreciation, in I-GenEntert (↑10 for only up to 60%) and Θ-BeliefsPol (↑10 78%).…”

“…Thus, we gathered the total counts of up-& downvotes, both accumulated called Karma, and posts & repliers per annotated thread. From these figures, we derive two scores: i) Conversationness [19] as an indicator for thread participation homogeneity. It represents the ratio of #repliers to #replies, i.e., higher values equal more people with fewer responses.…”

“…We conclude that research on anonymous hyperlocal platforms has matured over past years, yet existing studies ironically neglect their key feature-they focus on the Western/US region only. While the Jodel app's usage has surged in the Middle East (KSA), establishing a loyal user base [18], it is characterized by a hugely different user behavior compared to a Western counterpart [19]. Within this context, we provide answers as to what drives individual user behavior and what are discussed topics; enabled by our methodological approach to a generic crowdsourcing annotation schema.…”

“…Nonetheless, society is continually changing, and has changed, e.g., women's right to vote in 2015, or the KSA was about to lift the women driving ban in 2017. Recent research empirically shows the Saudi Arabian user base to be active in creating and reacting to content over voting-contrasting a Western counterpart [19]. We take this as motivation to study social media posts in the KSA as intra-country and platform study.…”

“…The app only displays content posted within the users' proximity-unlike Twitter and other platforms, no communication with remote users is possible. The platform became popular in the KSA in 2017 [19]. Research Questions.…”