Economy
What Twitter Can Tell Us About Unemployment
Where, when, and how people tweet reveals information about the socioeconomics of a region.
The Twitterverse is not easy to navigate. It's noisy. It's full of trolls and Twitterbots. Whether you're trolling or tweeting for good, one thing is clear—every time you tweet, you leave a little trace of yourself.
Scientists can piece these digital clues together and generate big pictures about who we are and where we live. Last week, my colleague Laura Bliss explained how researchers used Twitter to demonstrate how the 'six degrees of separation' theory breaks down within cities. In a new study, mathematicians in Spain have isolated patterns in geo-mapped tweets and examined how these patterns relate to unemployment rates.