Cross-cultural emotional polarity comparison of emoji on Chinese and Western social media in the context of the World Cup

In the age of digital communication, emojis function not only as affective cues but also as socially enregistered symbols shaped by cultural context and platform affordances. However, cross-cultural work often presumes within-culture stability and overlooks platform dynamics; synchronized event-window comparisons are rare. Guided by enregisterment theory, this study offers a descriptive cross-platform analysis of Weibo and Twitter during the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The objective is to quantify category- and emoji-level sentiment and to identify systematic cross-platform contrasts in polarity distributions and mean intensities. Using a corpus of over 488,000 posts, the analysis applies sentiment-polarity methods and a function-based emoji categorization to compare emotional expression patterns. Kernel density and mean comparisons reveal divergent affective styles: Weibo exhibits more direct, affect-rich emoji use, whereas Twitter shows a more restrained, metaphorical style. These contrasts are interpreted—without causal claims—as consistent with an enregisterment account in which meanings cohere through repeated use at the intersection of cultural affect norms and platform affordances. This study refines sociolinguistic understandings of digital symbols in global cross-platform communication.