A study on “the geography of Twitter” carried out by scientists from the University of Illinois (USA) and published in the scientific journalFirst Monday reveals thatthe city that generates the most tweets in the world is Jakarta (2.86%), in Indonesia, followed by New York (2.65), São Paulo (2.62), Kuala Lumpur (2.10) and, in fifth place, Paris (2.03). The rest of the top ten is occupied by Istanbul (1.60), London (1.57), Rio de Janeiro (1.39), Chicago (1.28) and, in tenth position,Madrid(1.17). The analysis is based on150 billion georeferenced messagessent through the microblogging platform. As for the city whose messages are retweeted more times by users of the microblogging platform, the data places New York in the first position.
The study also reveals that most of the tweets analyzed, specifically 41.57% of the georeferenced ones, were written inEnglish. The second place among the most common languages went to theSpanish, with 11.16% of the tweets analyzed, followed byPortuguese(9.50%). Regarding content, half of the news tweeted by users referred to events geographically close to them, and the other half to events that occurred further afield. The fastest growing areas for Twitter right now are in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
The authors regret that only 3% of the tweets include information about the place from which they were issued, which limits the possibilities of analysis from. And they ask that the use of algorithms and other systems be standardized that allow sociological studies to collect data on the origin of Twitter users, which is the “largest social laboratory in the world” that exists.
