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It seems to me that as a subject pool, Twitter is extremely bad (like other options that researchers tend pick out of frugality, like Mechanical Turk). Why use
by tgv 4y ago
It seems to me that as a subject pool, Twitter is extremely bad (like other options that researchers tend pick out of frugality, like Mechanical Turk). Why use it at all?
- madeofpalk 4y agoTwitter is the exclusive source of tweets, so there's that.
- naasking 4y agoI think the paper showing that Twitter activity slightly predicted stock movements was incredibly interesting and valuable to know. I'm sure there are plenty of other papers as well, like analyses of Arab spring?
- tgv 4y agoAn analysis of the Arab spring could also have been made with other sources. It's easy material, that's what Twitter is. Easy, but also misleading.
- naasking 4y agoTwitter was a big driving force in that movement. Being able to track moment by moment activity and movements and how this shaped the Arab spring is not something you could achieve with other sources.
- tablespoon 4y ago> Twitter was a big driving force in that movement. Being able to track moment by moment activity and movements and how this shaped the Arab spring is not something you could achieve with other sources. Would anyone have been able to do that without paying? Years ago, someone told me you could get at most 1% of the "firehose" without paying, and if you paid you could get ~10% (however the free sample wasn't a subset of the paid sample, so they still grabbed both and de-duped).
- naasking 4y agoI meant that you could reconstruct the moment by moment events after the fact. That's where the value for social science comes in.
- anigbrowl 4y agoYou can do a lot with the 1% sample - indeed you would probably want to filter it further, both because retrieved streams count toward your monthly tweet cap (2 million/mo on the best non-academic free tier, I think 5m or 10m month if you are a postgrad w/institutional affiliation), and because the filtering capabilities are pretty rich. An obvious use case is tracking big political or industrial influencers and estimating their reach and peer cohort by looking at different kinds of engagement they get.
- bruce343434 4y agolink to the stock movement one?
- naasking 4y agohttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S187775031100007X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18777...