Abstract
This article examines the different ways Twitter users told the story of disgraced former Chinese official Bo Xilai in the English language and in Chinese. Twitter gives both language communities a common set of technological tools, but the context around each community's discussion is quite different. We examine the differences in content and user behavior between these discussions and explore the possible reasons, including disparate governance and media systems, properties of the languages, and social media culture. Comparing the same technological tool in vastly different social contexts allows us to begin to distinguish technologically versus socially driven features of these data-sets. We see Twitter as a manifestation of the fifth estate of online social media, which is distinct from but deeply interwoven with the fourth estate of the news media.
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