Cultural Norms and Interpersonal Relationships: Comparing Disclosure Behaviors on Twitter

This study performs an initial exploration of cultural differences in social media disclosure behaviors. We focus on what U.S. and India users disclose about interpersonal relationships on Twitter, a popular social networking platform that has gained enormous traction outside the U.S. We developed a taxonomy of words representing interpersonal relationships and then collected all tweets containing these words (~4.5 million tweets) uploaded from India and the U.S. over a one-month period of time. We found that Indian tweets about others tend to be statistically significantly more positive and uncover differences in how they tweet about various relationships (family, friends, others) in comparison to U.S. users. Drawing on theories of collectivism and individualism, we discuss how different cultural attitudes may explain these behaviors. We present implications for research and for designing to support cultural norms.