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Understanding the Demographics of Twitter Users

Authors

Alan Mislove,Sune Lehmann,Yong-Yeol Ahn,Jukka-Pekka Onnela,J. Rosenquist

Northeastern University,Technical University of Denmark,Northeastern University,Harvard University,Harvard University


Proceedings:

Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 5

Volume

Issue:

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2011): Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

Track:

Poster Papers

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Abstract:

Every second, the thoughts and feelings of millions of people across the world are recorded in the form of 140-character tweets using Twitter. However, despite the enormous potential presented by this remarkable data source, we still do not have an understanding of the Twitter population itself: Who are the Twitter users? How representative of the overall population are they? In this paper, we take the first steps towards answering these questions by analyzing data on a set of Twitter users representing over 1% of the U.S. population. We develop techniques that allow us to compare the Twitter population to the U.S. population along three axes (geography, gender, and race/ethnicity), and find that the Twitter population is a highly non-uniform sample of the population.

DOI:

10.1609/icwsm.v5i1.14168


ICWSM

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2011): Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media