The Tweet Gross Domestic Product Tool

October 16, 2015

Twitter can be used to figure out your personal income.  Twitter was not designed to be a tool to tally a person’s financial wealth, instead it is a communication tool based on a one hundred forty character messages to generate for small, concise delivery.  Twitter can be used to chat with friends, stars, business executives, etc, follow news trends, and even advertise products by sent to a tailored audience.  According to Red Orbit in the article “People Can Guess Your Income Based On Your Tweets,” Twitter has another application.

Other research done on Twitter has revealed that your age, location, political preferences, and disposition to insomnia, but your tweet history also reveals your income.  Apparently, if you tweet less, you make more money.  The controls and variables for the experiment were discussed, including that 5,191 Twitter accounts with over ten million tweets were analyzed and accounts with a user’s identifiable profession were used.

Users with a high follower and following ratio had the most income and they tended to post the least.  Posting throughout the day and cursing indicated a user with a lower income.  The content of tweets also displayed a plethora of “wealth” information:

“It isn’t just the topics of your tweets that’s giving you away either. Researchers found that “users with higher income post less emotional (positive and negative) but more neutral content, exhibiting more anger and fear, but less surprise, sadness and disgust.” It was also apparent that those who swore more frequently in their tweets had lower income.”

Twitter uses the information to tailor ads for users, if you share neutral posts get targeted ads advertising expensive items, while the cursers get less expensive ad campaigns.  The study also proves that it is important to monitor your Twitter profile, so you are posting the best side of yourself rather than shooting yourself in the foot.

Whitney Grace, October 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph

 

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