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Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to investigate how cross-cultural elements such as cultural difference and stereotype are integrated into collaborative modes and actions and to explore their corresponding effectiveness. Design/methodology/approach: The sample of the quantitative content analysis is drawn from the posts with the topic of China on Quora. A collaborative case, where two users have a question-and-answer interaction, is taken as the unit of analysis. The effectiveness of collaboration is operationalized as the extent to which a collaboratively produced answer is visited and favorably reviewed, using the feedback index (the number of upvotes*1,000/views). One of the sampled collaborative cases is further analyzed qualitatively to see how cultural differences, stereotypes and other factors are incorporated into users' interaction. Findings: This content analysis reveals nine modes of collaborative production of knowledge on Quora: initial questioning, pointed answering, raising doubts, responding to others, agreeing with others, correcting mistakes, enriching content, further questioning and extending issues. Diversity of the cross-cultural acts of collaborative production, particularly two of often-used collaborative actions, correcting stereotypes and supplementing cultural differences, helps to enhance overall collaborative effectiveness. Practical implications: This paper offers new perspectives and ideas for strategies to change socially problematic stereotypes, e.g. to correct stereotypes where necessary and use more convincing resources such as reliable images as collaborative actions to bridge cultural differences. It also calls on social Q&A website developers to create more international users-friendly design by providing various channels for users with diverse cultural backgrounds to interact with each other. Originality/value: This study is one of the first to investigate online collaborative knowledge production within a broader cross-cultural context. Specifically, cultural factors and cross-cultural collaborative actions have been innovatively integrated into this research, enriching the dimensions that can be used for collaboration classification. It is helpful for users from different countries to actively adopting different strategies to overcome cultural differences, preconceptions and other negative factors that are not conducive to communication and knowledge acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: COVID-19, an infectious disease first identified in China, has resulted in an ongoing pandemic all over the world. Most of the countries have been experiencing a difficult period during the fighting of this pandemic. The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of privacy concerns and cultural differences on public opinion related to the pandemic. The authors conducted a comparative analysis of public opinion in the US and in China as a case study, in order to determine the results. Design/methodology/approach: National policies on important issues faced during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US and in China were examined through a comparative analysis. The authors used text clustering and visualization to mine public opinion on two popular social media platforms, Twitter and Weibo. From the perspectives of concern for privacy and of national culture, this study combines qualitative and quantitative analysis to discover the acceptance level of national policies by the public in the two countries. Findings: The anti-pandemic policies and measures of the US and China reflect the different characteristics of their respective political systems and national cultures. When considering the culture of the US, it is hard to establish and enforce a rigorous regulation on either mask wearing in public or home quarantine on the national level. The opinions of US people are diverse, regarding national COVID-19 policies, but they are rather unified on privacy issues. On the other hand, Chinese people show a high acceptance of national policies based on their mask-wearing customs and their culture of collectivism. Originality/value: Prior studies have paid insufficient attention to the ways in which user privacy and cultural difference affect public opinion on national policies between the US and China. This case study that compares public opinion on current and topical issues which are closely bound up with public life shows originality, as it innovatively provides a cross-cultural perspective on the research of public opinion dissemination during emergencies by considering the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]