Who Tweets with Their Location? Understanding the Relationship between Demographic Characteristics and the Use of Geoservices and Geotagging on Twitter

PLoS One. 2015 Nov 6;10(11):e0142209. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0142209. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

In this paper we take advantage of recent developments in identifying the demographic characteristics of Twitter users to explore the demographic differences between those who do and do not enable location services and those who do and do not geotag their tweets. We discuss the collation and processing of two datasets-one focusing on enabling geoservices and the other on tweet geotagging. We then investigate how opting in to either of these behaviours is associated with gender, age, class, the language in which tweets are written and the language in which users interact with the Twitter user interface. We find statistically significant differences for both behaviours for all demographic characteristics, although the magnitude of association differs substantially by factor. We conclude that there are significant demographic variations between those who opt in to geoservices and those who geotag their tweets. Not withstanding the limitations of the data, we suggest that Twitter users who publish geographical information are not representative of the wider Twitter population.

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Blogging / statistics & numerical data*
  • Demography*
  • Female
  • Geography*
  • Humans
  • Language
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Social Class
  • Social Media / statistics & numerical data*
  • Young Adult

Grants and funding

The Collaborative Online Social Media Observatory (COSMOS) has received funding for platform development from Jisc (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_research/researchtools/COSMOS.aspx), the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/J009903/1, ES/K008013/1, ES/M003329/1), the National Centre Research for Methods (512589112 - http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/research/MIP/prediction.php) and High Performance Computing Wales (Scaling the Computational Analysis of "Big Social Data" & Massive Temporal Social Media Datasets). Details of all other awards associated with the project can be found on the COSMOS website (http://www.cosmosproject.net/). However, the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.