即時性社交媒體的出現與普及促使全球化與在地化的界線模糊，然而不同社群參與同一事件的討論，仍有全球觀點與在地觀點的差異與交融。研究者嘗試透過社交媒體鉅量資料分析取徑，探索在全球社交媒體中不同形式網路社群的浮現方式。

The widespread use of social media has promoted the blurring of geographical boundaries in recent years. Users from various countries can discuss events and topics that occur in any location. However, discussions of the same event or topic may still differ between communities because conformity to the global viewpoint varies based on local political and cultural backgrounds. Distinguishing the contents and modes of communication of various global social media communities is a major challenge in communication research. To address this concern, we investigated the 2012 Taiwanese presidential election. This election was both a local event and a global issue of discussion, both among Twitter users from Taiwan and in several foreign Twitter communities. We applied a Big-Data approach for analyzing the difference in the interests of different communities with respect to this election and the dynamics in their modes of communication. Local Taiwanese Twitter users engaged in heavy discussion before, during, and after the election. However, users from China mostly disclosed their concerns by retweeting and began discussing the election only once it was completed. By contrast, Japanese users “broadcasted” the news and only retweeted content published by news agencies. Thus, the results of this study indicated that the different patterns and modes of communication of social media communities that use different language codes can be identified.