Global news-making practices on Twitter: Exploring English-Chinese language boundary spanning

Although languages and cultural boundaries circumscribe the reach of news, global news regularly flows across geographical boundaries at high velocity, particularly on social media. This research explores the role multicultural individuals play in global news flows on the Twitter social media platform. We examine the case of a Chinese documentary film about pollution. Through a quantitative network analysis, we identify the key opinion leaders in the Chinese and English language discussion of the film on Twitter. An in-depth qualitative analysis was then conducted on the opinion leaders to understand their different strategies and practices for constructing and disseminating global news.