School Bullying in Twitter and Weibo: A Comparative Study

School-based bullying is a serious health issue among adolescents world wide. We identify several differences in microblogs of school-based bullying between Twitter (mostly representing the USA) and Weibo (mostly representing China). First, we see a smaller fraction of victim authors in Weibo than in Twitter. We hypothesize that this may be due to Asian culture’s emphasis on saving face where it is more of a taboo to be a victim or label someone a victim. Second, we see different temporal dynamics of school bullying posts due to differences in holidays and length of school days. Finally, bullying posts from Weibo contain more mentions of family than those from Twitter. This may be due to the greater emphasis on family in Asian cultures.