Unmasking the Keyboard Warrior

Perhaps not his original intention but Phil Jones provides an unlikely source to remind us that social media users are not representative of the general population. Data from the Pew Research Center suggests that social media users in the U.S. are younger, better educated and more liberal than the general population. They are more political but less likely to vote.

In the U.S. most Twitter users rarely tweet. In fact, the most prolific 10% of users create 80% of the tweets. Data for the U.K and Europe provide similar findings. 

The research tells us that social media users are far from demographically representative of the population. Social data is not necessarily suitable for research where representativeness is important to understand population behaviour, for example in politics and election forecasting or gaining insight into attitudes, sentiments or activities of large populations.

“Twitter is not America” was the headline of an article from The Atlantic that highlighted to those in the media industry that social data, whilst instantly accessible, should not be the sole source of commentary on matters of the day given “few people who work outside the information industries choose to spend their lives reading tweets, let alone writing them.”

“Twitter is a highly individual experience that works like a collective hallucination, not a community."

“Reporting on views from social media alone can distort the public sphere and provide a false model of society.”

For a deeper dive into the differences between social media and the general population grab a pot noodle and have a read of the Pew Research Center's article "Sizing Up Twitter Users".

The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of FTI Consulting, Inc., its management, its subsidiaries, its affiliates, or its other professionals. 

FTI Consulting, Inc., including its subsidiaries and affiliates, is a consulting firm and is not a certified public accounting firm or a law firm.