Observational Comparison of Geo-tagged and Randomly-drawn Tweets Tom Lippincott and Annabelle Carrell Johns Hopkins University
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[email protected] Abstract for dissemination. More specific factors like coun- try, culture, and technology further complicate the Twitter is a ubiquitous source of micro-blog relationship between geo-tagged accounts and the social media data, providing the academic, in- general user base.(Sunghwan Mac Kim and Paris, dustrial, and public sectors real-time access to 2016; Karbasian et al., 2018) actionable information. A particularly attrac- tive property of some tweets is geo-tagging, where a user account has opted-in to attaching 2 Previous studies their current location to each message. Unfor- tunately (from a researcher’s perspective) only A number of prior work has investigated how a fraction of Twitter accounts agree to this, and Twitter users, and subsets thereof, relate to more these accounts are likely to have systematic general populations. (Malik et al., 2015) collate diffences with the general population. This work is an exploratory study of these differ- two months of geo-tagged tweets originating in ences across the full range of Twitter content, the United States with county-level demographic and complements previous studies that focus data, and determine that geo-tagged users differ on the English-language subset. Additionally, from the population in familiar ways (higher pro- we compare methods for querying users by portions of urban, younger, higher-income users) self-identified properties, finding that the con- and a few less-intuitive ways (higher proportions strained semantics of the “description” field of Hispanic/Latino and Black users).