Close X
Monday, November 11, 2024
ADVT 
Life

Facebook, Twitter data do not reveal true human behaviour

Darpan News Desk IANS, 28 Nov, 2014 12:19 PM
    As researchers are mining Facebook and Twitter data to learn about online and offline human behaviour, a new study warns them to be wary of serious pitfalls that arise when working with huge social media data sets.
     
    Such erroneous results can have huge implications as thousands of research papers each year are now based on data gleaned from social media.
     
    "Publicly available data feeds used in social media research do not always provide an accurate representation of the platform's overall data - and researchers are generally in the dark about when and how social media providers filter their data streams," explained Derek Ruths, assistant professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
     
    "A large number of spammers and bots, which masquerade as normal users on social media, get mistakenly incorporated into many measurements and predictions of human behaviour," Ruths said.
     
    The design of social media platforms can dictate how users behave and, therefore, what behaviour can be measured.
     
    "For instance, on Facebook the absence of a "dislike" button makes negative responses to content harder to detect than positive "likes," added study co-author Jurgen Pfeffer of Carnegie Mellon University's Institute for Software Research.
     
    Researchers often report results for groups of easy-to-classify users, topics and events - making new methods seem more accurate than they actually are.
     
    For instance, efforts to infer political orientation of Twitter users achieve barely 65 percent accuracy for typical users - even though studies (focusing on politically active users) have claimed 90 percent accuracy, the authors contended.
     
    "The common thread in all these issues is the need for researchers to be more acutely aware of what they are actually analysing when working with social media data," Ruths concluded.
     
    The article appeared in the journal Science.

    MORE Life ARTICLES

    Your bed goes beyond just sex and sleep

    Your bed goes beyond just sex and sleep
    But the reality is that consumers have turned their mattresses into reading nooks, home offices, music dens, TV stations and even dining rooms....

    Your bed goes beyond just sex and sleep

    In college and stressed?

    In college and stressed?
    In college and cannot manage stress owing to studies or frequent relationship troubles? Take heart....

    In college and stressed?

    Fear of losing money affects investment

    Fear of losing money affects investment
    The more averse, or fearful, of losing money an investor is, the lower his or her willingness seems to be for taking risks in the stock market, says a study....

    Fear of losing money affects investment

    Teenagers active in evenings more prone to insomnia

    Teenagers active in evenings more prone to insomnia
    Have you witnessed your teenage son getting more active in the evenings compared to rest of the day? He may be prone to develop insomnia...

    Teenagers active in evenings more prone to insomnia

    What makes you a pessimist?

    What makes you a pessimist?
     Cannot see thing turning out to be all right? A hyperactive habenula, half the size of a pea in the brain that tracks predictions about negative....

    What makes you a pessimist?

    Device that scans your drink for safety

    Device that scans your drink for safety
    Next time you go to a party in a bar, do not hesitate if someone offers you a drink. Just dip this little stick clandestinely in the glass and get to know if the drink is spiked or not...

    Device that scans your drink for safety