Cultural values inherent in the design of social media platforms: A case study of WeChat

Abstract

Recently, there has been a tremendous rise in the growth of social media platforms all over the world. Most social media platforms are created for worldwide consumption and it is usually a sig-nificant challenge to develop these platforms for users from various cultural backgrounds. While culturally centric user behaviour of social media platforms has been well-documented, the cultural values inherent within the design of these platforms has not been thoroughly explored. This study proposes a conceptual cultural values model to examine the cultural characteristics inherent within WeChat, a Chinese social media platform. We use a research model based on Chinese cultural val-ues to validate the model for the full scale study.