Cultural Values Inherent in the Design of Social Media Platforms: A Case Study of WeChat.

Most social media platforms are created for worldwide consumption and it is usually a significant 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 in-herent 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 values to validate the model for the full scale study.