[Air-L] visualizing twitter's evolution 2012-2018

[kalev leetaru]

Given all of the discussion last month around social media analysis, I
thought my latest piece might be of considerable interest, tracing the
evolution of Twitter 2012-2018 through the 1% stream, charting everything
from its growth to its retweet and linking trends, to its changing
geography. There are a lot of statistics in there of considerable relevance
for those studying Twitter and social media more broadly:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/03/04/visualizing-seven-years-of-twitters-evolution-2012-2018/

It essentially repeats the analyses of my previous 2012 and 2015 studies,
this time with a much longer time horizon, updating a number of the
statistics and charting how they have changed over time:

https://firstmonday.org/article/view/4366/3654

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/08/twitter-global-social-media/402415/

The transition of Twitter from a content platform to a behavioral platform
via its centralization around elite accounts and the rising retweet density
have particular algorithmic and methodological implications for Twitter
studies.

Kalev