A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Geotagging Behavior on Twitter

TL;DR

This large-scale empirical study analyzes geotagging behavior on Twitter, revealing significant user group differences, profile location influence, and homophily effects, which challenge common assumptions used in social media mobility research.

Contribution

The paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of geotagging behavior on Twitter using over 40 billion tweets, highlighting key behavioral patterns and biases.

Findings

User geotagging preferences vary significantly across language groups.

Users with profile locations are more likely to geotag tweets.

Strong homophily exists in geotagging behavior among social connections.

Abstract

Geotagging on social media has become an important proxy for understanding people's mobility and social events. Research that uses geotags to infer public opinions relies on several key assumptions about the behavior of geotagged and non-geotagged users. However, these assumptions have not been fully validated. Lack of understanding the geotagging behavior prohibits people further utilizing it. In this paper, we present an empirical study of geotagging behavior on Twitter based on more than 40 billion tweets collected from 20 million users. There are three main findings that may challenge these common assumptions. Firstly, different groups of users have different geotagging preferences. For example, less than 3% of users speaking in Korean are geotagged, while more than 40% of users speaking in Indonesian use geotags. Secondly, users who report their locations in profiles are more likely to use geotags, which may affects the generability of those location prediction systems on non-geotagged users. Thirdly, strong homophily effect exists in users' geotagging behavior, that users tend to connect to friends with similar geotagging preferences.