Microblogging without Borders: differences and similarities

Conference item

The fast increase in the ease of access to computing, coupled with the rapid growth of social media has provided the space and motivated people all over the world to publicly share many kinds of information, from general interest topics such as elections and fashion to private topics such as the user’s mood. The widespread use of microblogging services such as Twitter, in particular, have led to vast amounts of data generated by users in many different countries. In spite of this, very little is known about the differences and similarities in the way that people in different countries use such microblogging services. In this paper, we describe the analysis of a large-scale collection of Twitter data. First, we collected more than 550 million tweets from over 76 million users during August 20-29, 2010. Then, we identified the 10 countries with the highest volume of tweets during that period, and finally, selected the users from that period for those 10 countries, and collected all of their tweets for an entire year. Our analysis is based on over 5 billion tweets for 4.7 million anonymous users. We highlighting differences and similarities among these 10 countries with respect to language use, sentiment, and content of tweets.

Authors: Garcia-Gavilanes, R; Poblete, B; Mendoza, M; Jaimes, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Host title: Poster Session at ACM WebSci '11, 3rd International Conference on Web Science
• Journal: Poster Session at ACM WebSci '11, 3rd International Conference on Web Science
• Publication date: 2011-06-15
• Keywords: SBTMR