Interviews, Politics & Government, Social Data Science

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

by David Sutcliffe 10/04/2017

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

by David Sutcliffe 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 David Sutcliffe 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 David Sutcliffe 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…