Interviews, Politics & Government, Social Data Science

Did you consider Twitter’s (lack of) representativeness before doing that predictive study?

by Grant Blank 10/04/2017

Do Twitter users share identical characteristics with the population interest? For what populations are Twitter data actually appropriate?

by Grant Blank 10/04/2017

Twitter data have many qualities that appeal to researchers, but are probably not suitable for research where representativeness is important. Image: Bernard Goldbach (Flickr).

Twitter data have many qualities that appeal to researchers. They are extraordinarily easy to collect. They are available in very large quantities. And with a simple 140-character text limit they are easy to analyse. As a result of these attractive qualities, over 1,400 papers have been published using Twitter data, including many attempts to predict disease outbreaks, election results, film box office gross, and stock market movements solely from the content of tweets. Easy availability of Twitter data links nicely to a key goal of computational social science. If researchers can find ways to impute user characteristics from social media, then the capabilities of computational social science would be greatly extended. However few papers consider the digital divide among Twitter users. But the question of who uses Twitter has major implications for research attempts to use the content of tweets for inference about population behaviour. Do Twitter users share identical characteristics with the population interest? For what populations are Twitter data actually appropriate? A new article by Grant Blank published in Social Science Computer Review provides a multivariate empirical analysis of the digital divide among Twitter users, comparing Twitter users and nonusers with respect to their characteristic patterns of Internet activity and to certain key attitudes. It thereby fills a gap in our knowledge about an important social media platform, and it joins a surprisingly small number of studies that describe the population that uses social media. Comparing British (OxIS survey) and US (Pew) data, Grant finds that generally, British Twitter users are younger, wealthier, and better educated than other Internet users, who in turn are younger, wealthier, and better educated than the offline British population. American Twitter users are also younger and wealthier than the rest of the population, but they are not better educated. Twitter users are disproportionately members of elites in both countries. Twitter users also differ from other groups in their online activities and their attitudes.…

Interviews, Social Data Science, Wellbeing

Estimating the Local Geographies of Digital Inequality in Britain: London and the South East Show Highest Internet Use—But Why?

by Grant Blank 01/03/2017

Britain has one of the largest Internet economies in the developed world, and the Internet contributes an estimated 8.3 percent to Britain’s GDP.

by Grant Blank 01/03/2017

Despite the huge importance of the Internet in everyday life, we know surprisingly little about the geography of Internet use and participation at sub-national scales. A new article on Local Geographies of Digital Inequality by Grant Blank, Mark Graham, and Claudio Calvino published in Social Science Computer Review proposes a novel method to calculate the local geographies of Internet usage, employing Britain as an initial case study. In the first attempt to estimate Internet use at any small-scale level, they combine data from a sample survey, the 2013 Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS), with the 2011 UK census, employing small area estimation to estimate Internet use in small geographies in Britain. (Read the paper for more on this method, and discussion of why there has been little work on the geography of digital inequality.) There are two major reasons to suspect that geographic differences in Internet use may be important: apparent regional differences and the urban-rural divide. The authors do indeed find a regional difference: the area with least Internet use is in the North East, followed by central Wales; the highest is in London and the South East. But interestingly, geographic differences become non-significant after controlling for demographic variables (age, education, income etc.). That is, demographics matter more than simply where you live, in terms of the likelihood that you’re an Internet user. Britain has one of the largest Internet economies in the developed world, and the Internet contributes an estimated 8.3 percent to Britain’s GDP. By reducing a range of geographic frictions and allowing access to new customers, markets and ideas it strongly supports domestic job and income growth. There are also personal benefits to Internet use. However, these advantages are denied to people who are not online, leading to a stream of research on the so-called digital divide. We caught up with Grant Blank to discuss the policy implications of this marked disparity in (estimated) Internet use across…

Child Safety, Governance & Security

Young people are the most likely to take action to protect their privacy on social networking sites

by Grant Blank 14/08/2014

So are young people completely unconcerned about their privacy online, gaily granting access to everything to everyone? Well, in a word, no.

by Grant Blank 14/08/2014

A pretty good idea of what not to do on a social media site. Image by Sean MacEntee. Standing on a stage in San Francisco in early 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, partly responding to the site’s decision to change the privacy settings of its 350 million users, announced that as Internet users had become more comfortable sharing information online, privacy was no longer a “social norm”. Of course, he had an obvious commercial interest in relaxing norms surrounding online privacy, but this attitude has nevertheless been widely echoed in the popular media. Young people are supposed to be sharing their private lives online—and providing huge amounts of data for commercial and government entities—because they don’t fully understand the implications of the public nature of the Internet. There has actually been little systematic research on the privacy behaviour of different age groups in online settings. But there is certainly evidence of a growing (general) concern about online privacy (Marwick et al., 2010), with a 2013 Pew study finding that 50 percent of Internet users were worried about the information available about them online, up from 30 percent in 2009. Following the recent revelations about the NSA’s surveillance activities, a Washington Post-ABC poll reported 40 percent of its U.S. respondents as saying that it was more important to protect citizens’ privacy even if it limited the ability of the government to investigate terrorist threats. But what of young people, specifically? Do they really care less about their online privacy than older users? Privacy concerns an individual’s ability to control what personal information about them is disclosed, to whom, when, and under what circumstances. We present different versions of ourselves to different audiences, and the expectations and norms of the particular audience (or context) will determine what personal information is presented or kept hidden. This highlights a fundamental problem with privacy in some SNSs: that of ‘context collapse’ (Marwick and boyd 2011).…

Mapping

Mapping the Local Geographies of Digital Inequality in Britain

by Grant Blank 27/06/2014

Without detailed information about small areas we can’t identify where would benefit most from policy intervention to encourage Internet use and improve access.

by Grant Blank 27/06/2014

Britain has one of the largest Internet economies in the industrial world. The Internet contributes an estimated 8.3% to Britain’s GDP (Dean et al. 2012), and strongly supports domestic job and income growth by enabling access to new customers, markets and ideas. People benefit from better communications, and businesses are more likely to locate in areas with good digital access, thereby boosting local economies (Malecki & Moriset 2008). While the Internet brings clear benefits, there is also a marked inequality in its uptake and use (the so-called ‘digital divide’). We already know from the Oxford Internet Surveys (OxIS) that Internet use in Britain is strongly stratified by age, by income and by education; and yet we know almost nothing about local patterns of Internet use across the country. A problem with national sample surveys (the usual source of data about Internet use and non-use), is that the sample sizes become too small to allow accurate generalisation at smaller, sub-national areas. No one knows, for example, the proportion of Internet users in Glasgow, because national surveys simply won’t have enough respondents to make reliable city-level estimates. We know that Internet use is not evenly distributed at the regional level; Ofcom reports on broadband speeds and penetration at the county level (Ofcom 2011), and we know that London and the southeast are the most wired part of the country (Dean et al. 2012). But given the importance of the Internet, the lack of knowledge about local patterns of access and use in Britain is surprising. This is a problem because without detailed information about small areas we can’t identify where would benefit most from policy intervention to encourage Internet use and improve access. We have begun to address this lack of information by combining two important but separate datasets—the 2011 national census, and the 2013 OxIS surveys—using the technique of small area estimation. By definition, census data are available for very small…