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Understanding the Demographics of Twitter Users

2021; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1609/icwsm.v5i1.14168

2334-0770

Alan Mislove, Sune Lehmann, Yong‐Yeol Ahn, Jukka‐Pekka Onnela, Jan Rosenquist,

Advanced Text Analysis Techniques

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.