Tweets from mobile likelier to be egocentric

A new study has revealed that tweets from mobile devices are more likely to be egocentric than non-mobile device tweets.

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In the study, the researchers collected 235 million tweets, 90 percent of the top sources to access Twitter were coded to denote mobile, non-mobile and mixed sources.

Drawing from social psychological methods, they then studied language use in tweets by analysing the frequency and ratios of words traditionally associated with social and behavioral characteristics.

According to the researchers, mobile tweets were not only more egocentric in language than any other group, but that the ratio of egocentric to non-egocentric tweets was consistently greater for mobile tweets than from non-mobile sources.

However, they did not find that mobile tweets were particularly gendered.

Researcher Dhiraj Murthy of the University of London said that very little work had been done comparing how their social media activities vary from mobile to non-mobile.

Murthy said that their work was transformative in this understudied field as they found that not all tweets were the same and the source of tweets does influence tweeting patterns.

The study is published in the Journal of Communication.