Web use remains highly regional even in the age of global platform monopolies

Abstract

The Internet, since its inception, has been imagined as a technology that enables information to overcome barriers of language and geography. As a handful of social media platforms now dominate globally, removing most barriers of distribution; this has created unprecedented opportunities for content to gain worldwide traction, regardless of its country of origin. Yet historically with few exceptions, people generally consume content that is from or for their region. Has the Internet or social media really altered this trait? Analyzing the extent of similarities between a hundred countries’ web use patterns simultaneously across their most popular websites, and country specific trends from YouTube and Twitter respectively, we find that countries which share borders or where people speak the same languages have the most similar web use patterns. Global social media usage on both YouTube and Twitter is even more heterogeneous and driven to a larger extent by language and geography than global website traffic. Neither does high prevalence of English language speakers in the two countries, nor does one of them being the United States contributes substantially to web use similarity. Global web use remains highly regional. The technical affordances of the Internet alone are thus insufficient to render a cosmopolitan world.

Exploring YouTube’s Recommendation System in the Context of COVID-19 Vaccines: Computational and Comparative Analysis of Video Trajectories

“…A previous study [ 46 ] revealed that COVID-19–themed videos in hard-hit countries used different messaging approaches and gained attention at different times. As the popularity of web content is usually driven by language similarity and geographic proximity [ 47 , 48 ], we cannot draw conclusions about the spread of content in other languages and countries. It is possible that vaccine-related misinformation is moderated more effectively in English than in other languages.…”

“…As the popularity of web content is usually driven by language similarity and geographic proximity [47,48], we cannot draw conclusions about the spread of content in other languages and countries. It is possible that vaccine-related misinformation is moderated more effectively in English than in other languages.…”

A Cross-National Study of Fear Appeal Messages in YouTube Trending Videos About COVID-19

“…This study attempts to answer Rains’ (2020) call to apply big data and computational techniques to extend the literature on fear appeals. Since web use is blossoming along traditional lines, defined by languages and geographies ( Ng & Taneja, 2019 , 2023 ), beyond English-speaking countries (the United States, Canada, and New Zealand), this study examines YouTube’s message constructs in Taiwan (Traditional Chinese), Brazil (Portuguese), and Russia (Russian) through video transcripts. Employing a supervised machine learning method, this study analyzes phrases and topics related to fear appeals in broader scopes and scales.…”