LAUSR

Cultural exchanges between countries have become increasingly frequent through social media. Hashtags have gained significant attention for their effectiveness in the diffusion of cultural content. This study analyses the statistical characteristics of 740 099 hashtags from 1 282 339 videos related to French, American, Japanese and South Korean cultures over the past 14 years. The findings reveal that hashtag usage across four cultures follows consistent patterns, underpinning scaling laws such as Zipf’s and Taylor’s Laws. However, the relationship between the number of unique hashtags and the number of total hashtags deviates from the predictions of Heaps’ Law. We quantified the dynamic characteristics of hashtags by the generalized Jensen–Shannon divergence. The decay in similarity between the frequency distributions across four countries follows a sublinear trend, eventually reaching a stable state. Moreover, we propose a batch hashtag generation model, which can effectively reproduce the diffusion dynamics observed in the empirical data. The study shows that despite the complexity of cultural diffusion, hashtag systems follow simple patterns. These findings provide theoretical insights into the mechanisms of cross-cultural diffusion.