... is the title of our recent paper at ICWSM 2017, "our" being me, Zichen Liu, Alex Sciuto, and all of our kind advisor Jason Hong.
The paper, in one sentence: think of geotagged social media posts (tweets, instagrams, etc) as postcards, not as ticket stubs; as conscious choices, not unconscious byproducts.
In three bullet points:
- when people are posting something to Twitter/Flickr/etc, they usually consciously choose to add their location; it's not a "set it and forget it" situation. (we found this out by analyzing how often people toggle between geotagging and not.)
- when people post their location, they usually do it from unusual or faraway places. They usually don't do it at home or in their neighborhood, and they usually don't do it from places that they go to regularly. (this is from surveys.)
- people are posting their specific location less than they used to. Some of this might be privacy; a lot of it is because Twitter changed the defaults on how your location is posted.
In more detail:
Paper Slides
The paper, in one sentence: think of geotagged social media posts (tweets, instagrams, etc) as postcards, not as ticket stubs; as conscious choices, not unconscious byproducts.
In three bullet points:
- when people are posting something to Twitter/Flickr/etc, they usually consciously choose to add their location; it's not a "set it and forget it" situation. (we found this out by analyzing how often people toggle between geotagging and not.)
- when people post their location, they usually do it from unusual or faraway places. They usually don't do it at home or in their neighborhood, and they usually don't do it from places that they go to regularly. (this is from surveys.)
- people are posting their specific location less than they used to. Some of this might be privacy; a lot of it is because Twitter changed the defaults on how your location is posted.
In more detail:
Paper Slides
