Australian Twitter is more diverse than you think

What are the major drivers of Twitter take-up, in Australia and elsewhere? Do we connect around shared interests, shared location, or pre-existing offline relationships? And when, in the eleven-year history of the platform, did these structures form?

These are the questions that guided a new, long-term study of the Australian national Twittersphere that my colleagues and I have undertaken.

Drawing on TrISMA, a major multi-institutional facility for social media analytics, we identified some 3.7 million Australian Twitter accounts in existence by early 2016, and captured the 167 million follower/followee connections between them.

There are plenty of assumptions and not a great deal of reliable data about how we use social media.

Twitter, for example, is variously accused of being a haven for leftist outrage and a cesspool of alt-right fascists. It is seen as a crucial tool for crisis communication and a place where millennials share photos of their lunch. Surely, these can’t all be true.

Part of the problem here is that we all design our own filter bubbles. What two random users see on Twitter might be entirely different, depending on what accounts they choose to follow, as journalism researcher Paul Bradshaw has put it.

If all you ever see is food porn, perhaps you need to make some new connections. (Or perhaps that’s what you’re there for). But if we could look beyond our own, personal networks, what would we see? Read more

Axel Bruns - The Conversation - 3 May 2017