China's Sina Weibo Posts Are Happier Than Twitter Posts, Despite Censorship: Study

Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo is best known in the West as a censored version of Twitter. On the website, which boasts over 300 million registered users, politically critical comments are subject to deletion by government watchdogs.

But that doesn't seem to be getting anybody down. According to a new study from the Delft University of Technology in Holland and Shanghai's Jiaotong University, a full 79 percent of the messages posted on Sina Weibo were happy or positive. That's compared to 71 percent positive comments on Twitter, which has over 140 million users worldwide, most of whom are in the United States.

The differences didn't stop there: whereas Twitter posts mention 'organizations' such as companies or political parties 16 percent of the time, Sina Weibo users only mention such groups in three percent of all posts. Of course, this may be a result of censorship that restricts political discourse.

Overall, user topics and interests were more broad on Sina Weibo than on Twitter, concluded study authors, adding that this supports the Chinese tendency for collectivism rather than individualism.