By Eddie Wrenn
|
Twitter is a worldwide phenomenon - but it is more widespread in some countries than others.
Researchers from Oxford University were curious as to where the micro-blogging site is most used, and managed to take a snapshot of 'geo-tagged' tweets to figure out where most users make their posts from.
The United States leads the way, with more than 30 per cent of all tweets, followed by Brazil with 22 per cent, and Indonesia and the UK each holding around six per cent each.
China is almost completely absent, with the strict censorship laws of that country stopping civilians from accessing the service.
Mexico, Malaysia, Spain, Russia and France make up the next five Twitter nations, but by this point each country is down to less than two per cent of the total tweets.
New Tweet on the block: The area of each rectangle shows how many Tweets are sent per country
Mapped out: The same data placed on a map of the world shows how popular Twitter is in each country
This research was led by Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute, and Monica Stephens of Humboldt State in California.
Writing on the Oxford University website site, Graham said: 'Online social media has become an integral part of daily life for many Internet users and there are now hundreds of millions utilising these services around the world.
'Concomitant with this growth of usage is a desire by companies, government agencies, and academics to study and map the data trails left by people using services like Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook.
'The data shadows and information trails left by users online reveal social, economic, and political processes and practices.
'Twitter, in particular, is repeatedly used as a repository of social data because of its relatively open network that allows researchers access to almost any information published through the platform.
'Yet, despite the many studies (both inside and outside of academia) that draw on d ata from Twitter, there is little scholarship devoted to the geography of Twitter.
'As a first step, we decided to collect all georeferenced tweets sent between March 5 and March 13, 2012.
'It is important to point out that georeferenced tweets comprise fewer than one per cent of all tweets and it is possible that significant geographic biases exist in where and how people georeference their content.
'We then took a random 20 per cent sample of that dataset: giving us approximately 4.5 million tweets that we spatially joined at the country-level.
'Our graphic illustrates these data as a spatially aware treemap.
The size of each block represents the number of tweets emanating from that country and the shading reveals in the number of geocoded tweets as a proportion of that country's Internet population (so it gives us a sense of how likely Internet users are to create geocoded Twitter content).
'By mapping the distribution of tweets in the world it becomes apparent that Twitter is allowing for broader participation than is possible in most other platforms and media.
'In other words, it might be allowing for a 'democratisation' of information production and sharing because of its low barriers to entry and adaptability to mobile devices.
'Similarly barriers to the dissemination of information, such as censorship, are also visible through the small proportion of tweets originating in China (home to the largest population of internet users in the world).
'However, more research is undoubtedly necessary to better understand the geography of content on the platform. Our sample in this post is limited, and even more important only allows us to visualise the quantity of georeferenced tweets that pass through the platform.'
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar