Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Demography of Twitter Users in the City
of London: An Exploratory Spatial Data
Analysis Approach
Barbara Hofer, Thomas J. Lampoltshammer, and Mariana Belgiu
Introduction
Social media data like Twitter messages are increasingly used as source of infor-
mation about people and their individual perspectives. There are numerous studies
that investigate the content of posted messages to infer urban characteristics
(Wakamiya et al.
2011
), for policy making and scientific purposes (Craglia
et al.
2012
), or for advertising and social marketing (Pak and Paroubek
2010
).
The question persists, if certain demographic groups dominate social media
networks and if there is a digital divide expressing inequalities across the popula-
tion. The digital divide has been studied in the context of Internet use and social
network sites such as Twitter, Facebook or MySpace (Hwang and Park
2013
). A
recent study on Twitter news consumers found that almost half of the Twitter users
are between 18 and 28 years young, have at least a bachelor
s degree, and use
Twitter on mobile devices (Mitchell and Page
2013
). This image of the large group
of Twitter users reminds of the general Internet users. Internet users are described as
digital natives or “young people who grew up having constant Internet access and
who use the Web constantly throughout their life” (Boyd and Crawford
2012
).
Focusing on Twitter, this study analyses whether socio-demographic character-
istics relate to numbers of geolocated tweets. Following the findings on Twitter
'
