IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jamist/v63y2012i8p1631-1646.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Trending Twitter topics in English: An international comparison

Author

Listed:
  • David Wilkinson
  • Mike Thelwall

Abstract

The worldwide span of the microblogging service Twitter provides an opportunity to make international comparisons of trending topics of interest, such as news stories. Previous international comparisons of news interests have tended to use surveys and may bypass topics not well covered in the mainstream media. This study uses 9 months of English‐language Tweets from the United Kingdom, United States, India, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. Based upon the top 50 trending keywords in each country from the 0.5 billion Tweets collected, festivals or religious events are the most common, followed by media events, politics, human interest, and sports. U.S. trending topics have the most interest in the other countries and Indian trending topics the least. Conversely, India is the most interested in other countries’ trending topics and the United States the least. This gives evidence of an international hierarchy of perceived importance or relevance with some issues, such as the international interest in U.S. Thanksgiving celebrations, apparently not being directly driven by the media. This hierarchy echoes, and may be caused by, similar news coverage trends. Although the current imbalanced international news coverage does not seem to be out of step with public news interests, the political implication is that the Twitter‐using public reflects, and hence seems to implicitly accept, international imbalances in news media agenda setting rather than combating them. This is an issue for those believing that these imbalances make the media too powerful.

Suggested Citation

  • David Wilkinson & Mike Thelwall, 2012. "Trending Twitter topics in English: An international comparison," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(8), pages 1631-1646, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:63:y:2012:i:8:p:1631-1646
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.22713
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22713
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/asi.22713?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lareki, Arkaitz & Altuna, Jon & Martínez de Morentin, Juan Ignacio & Amenabar, Nere, 2017. "Young people and digital services: Analysis of the use, rules, and age requirement," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 126-131.
    2. Juan Miguel Carrascosa & Ruben Cuevas & Roberto Gonzalez & Arturo Azcorra & David Garcia, 2015. "Quantifying the Economic and Cultural Biases of Social Media through Trending Topics," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(7), pages 1-14, July.
    3. Ahmed Al-Rawi, 2022. "News loopholing: Telegram news as portable alternative media," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 5(1), pages 949-968, May.
    4. Vaughan, Liwen & Yang, Rongbin, 2013. "Web traffic and organization performance measures: Relationships and data sources examined," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(3), pages 699-711.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:63:y:2012:i:8:p:1631-1646. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.