  There has been a tremendous rise in the growth of online social networks all
over the world in recent times. While some networks like Twitter and Facebook
have been well documented, the popular Chinese microblogging social network
Sina Weibo has not been studied. In this work, we examine the key topics that
trend on Sina Weibo and contrast them with our observations on Twitter. We find
that there is a vast difference in the content shared in China, when compared
to a global social network such as Twitter. In China, the trends are created
almost entirely due to retweets of media content such as jokes, images and
videos, whereas on Twitter, the trends tend to have more to do with current
global events and news stories.
