Who Tweets? Deriving the Demographic Characteristics of Age, Occupation and Social Class from Twitter User Meta-Data
Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: This paper specifies, designs and critically evaluates two tools for the automated identification of demographic data (age, occupation and social class) from the profile descriptions of Twitter users in the United Kingdom (UK). Meta-data data routinely collected through the Collaborative Social Media Observatory (COSMOS: http://www.cosmosproject.net/) relating to UK Twitter users is matched with the occupational lookup tables between job and social class provided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) using SOC2010. Using expert human validation, the validity and reliability of the automated matching process is critically assessed and a prospective class distribution of UK Twitter users is offered with 2011 Census baseline comparisons. The pattern matching rules for identifying age are explained and enacted following a discussion on how to minimise false positives. The age distribution of Twitter users, as identified using the tool, is presented alongside the age distribution of the UK population from the 2011 Census. The automated occupation detection tool reliably identifies certain occupational groups, such as professionals, for which job titles cannot be confused with hobbies or are used in common parlance within alternative contexts. An alternative explanation on the prevalence of hobbies is that the creative sector is overrepresented on Twitter compared to 2011 Census data. The age detection tool illustrates the youthfulness of Twitter users compared to the general UK population as of the 2011 Census according to proportions, but projections demonstrate that there is still potentially a large number of older platform users. It is possible to detect "signatures" of both occupation and age from Twitter meta-data with varying degrees of accuracy (particularly dependent on occupational groups) but further confirmatory work is needed.
Source: PLoS ONE
Institution: Cardiff University
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,382
Awards: National Centre for Research Methods - Hub (Second Term), Public perceptions of the UK food system: public understanding and engagement, and the impact of crises and scares, Digital Social Research Tools, Tension Indicators and Safer Communities: a demonstration of the Cardiff Digital Research Platform (CDRP), 'Hate' Speech and Social Media: Understanding Users, Networks and Information Flows
OpenAlex ID: W1981229576