Characterizing Interconnections and Linguistic Patterns in Twitter

TL;DR

This study analyzes demographic patterns, linguistic styles, and social interactions among Twitter users in the US, revealing inequalities and differences across gender and race, and introduces a web tool for transparency.

Contribution

It combines image processing and linguistic analysis to characterize demographic interconnections and develops a web system to enhance transparency in Twitter trending topics.

Findings

White and male users have higher follower counts.

Distinct linguistic patterns exist across demographic groups.

Demographic disparities influence social connectivity and visibility.

Abstract

Social media is considered a democratic space in which people connect and interact with each other regardless of their gender, race, or any other demographic aspect. Despite numerous efforts that explore demographic aspects in social media, it is still unclear whether social media perpetuates old inequalities from the offline world. In this dissertation, we attempt to identify gender and race of Twitter users located in the United States using advanced image processing algorithms from Face++. We investigate how different demographic groups connect with each other and differentiate them regarding linguistic styles and also their interests. We quantify to what extent one group follows and interacts with each other and the extent to which these connections and interactions reflect in inequalities in Twitter. We also extract linguistic features from six categories (affective attributes, cognitive attributes, lexical density and awareness, temporal references, social and personal concerns, and interpersonal focus) in order to identify the similarities and the differences in the messages they share in Twitter. Furthermore, we extract the absolute ranking difference of top phrases between demographic groups. As a dimension of diversity, we use the topics of interest that we retrieve from each user. Our analysis shows that users identified as white and male tend to attain higher positions, in terms of the number of followers and number of times in another user's lists, in Twitter. There are clear differences in the way of writing across different demographic groups in both gender and race domains as well as in the topic of interest. We hope our effort can stimulate the development of new theories of demographic information in the online space. Finally, we developed a Web-based system that leverages the demographic aspects of users to provide transparency to the Twitter trending topics system.