[Air-L] twitter useless to study?

[Deen Freelon]

I think the amount of Twitter spam in one's dataset probably varies 
based on how it was drawn. In analyzing American political hashtags, our 
research team is finding very few tweets that appear commercial in 
nature. What we've found more of is "bot" accounts that auto-tweet 
aggregated—but still on-topic—content, which I wouldn't consider spam. 
And based on my own non-systematic observations, the major MENA hashtags 
(#jan25, #libya, #bahrain, etc.) appear to be mostly on-topic as well. ~DEEN

On 3/4/11 3:09 PM, Barry Wellman wrote:
> As an object of study, its hard to do quant analysis of Twitter now 
> because so much of it is spam (unless you're studying spam, that is).
>
> And even qualitative analyses will have to be careful.
>
> Our 2 Twitterology papers got into the sweet spot when Twitter was an 
> appreciable size but before spam dominated (about 80% of my new 
> would-be Followers)
>
> OTOH, I find Twitter useful for research leads -- such as the Atlantic 
> article a tweep broadcast today about how the Internet almost 
> fractured -- or Zeynep et al's (@techsoc) discussion of social media 
> and MENA revolutions.
> Barry Wellman
> _______________________________________________________________________
>
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-- 
Deen Freelon
Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of Communication
University of Washington
dfreelon at uw.edu
http://dfreelon.org/