White, Man, and Highly Followed: Gender and Race Inequalities in Twitter

Social media is considered a democratic space in which people connect and interact with each other regardless of their gender, race, or any other demographic factor. Despite numerous efforts that explore demographic factors in social media, it is still unclear whether social media perpetuates old inequalities from the offline world. In this paper, we attempt to identify gender and race of Twitter users located in U.S. using advanced image processing algorithms from Face++. Then, we investigate how different demographic groups (i.e. male/female, Asian/Black/White) connect with other. We quantify to what extent one group follow and interact with each other and the extent to which these connections and interactions reflect in inequalities in Twitter. Our analysis shows that users identified as White and male tend to attain higher positions in Twitter, in terms of the number of followers and number of times in user's lists. We hope our effort can stimulate the development of new theories of demographic information in the online space.Comment: In Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI'17). Leipzig, Germany. August 201

Inferring Social Media Users’ Demographics from Profile Pictures: A Face++ Analysis on Twitter Users

In this research, we evaluate the applicability of using facial recognition of social media account profile pictures to infer the demographic attributes of gender, race, and age of the account owners leveraging a commercial and well-known image service, specifically Face++. Our goal is to determine the feasibility of this approach for actual system implementation. Using a dataset of approximately 10,000 Twitter profile pictures, we use Face++ to classify this set of images for gender, race, and age. We determine that about 30% of these profile pictures contain identifiable images of people using the current state-of-the-art automated means. We then employ human evaluations to manually tag both the set of images that were determined to contain faces and the set that was determined not to contain faces, comparing the results to Face++. Of the thirty percent that Face++ identified as containing a face, about 80% are more likely than not the account holder based on our manual classification, with a variety of issues in the remaining 20%. Of the images that Face++ was unable to detect a face, we isolate a variety of likely issues preventing this detection, when a face actually appeared in the image. Overall, we find the applicability of automatic facial recognition to infer demographics for system development to be problematic, despite the reported high accuracy achieved for image test collection

Superdiversity

Superdiversity explores processes of diversification and the complex, emergent social configurations that now supersede prior forms of diversity in societies around the world. Migration plays a key role in these processes, bringing changes not just in social, cultural, religious and linguistic phenomena, but also in the ways that these phenomena combine with others like gender, age, and legal status. The concept of superdiversity has been adopted by scholars across the social sciences in order to address a variety of forms, modes and outcomes of diversification. Central to this field is the relationship between social categorization and social organization, including stratification and inequality. Increasingly complex categories of social ""difference"" have significant impacts across scales, from entire societies to individual identities. While diversification is often met with simplifying stereotypes, threat narratives, and expressions of antagonism, superdiversity encourages a perspective on difference as comprising multiple social processes, flexible collective meanings, and overlapping personal and group identities. A superdiversity approach encourages the re-evaluation and recognition of social categories as multidimensional, unfixed, and porous as opposed to views based on hardened, one-dimensional thinking about groups. Diversification and increasing social complexity are bound to continue, if not intensify, in light of climate change. This will have profound impacts on the nature of global migration, social relations, and inequalities. Superdiversity presents a convincing case for recognizing new social formations created by changing migration patterns and calls for a re-thinking of public policy and social scientific approaches to social difference.　 This introduction to the multidisciplinary concept of superdiversity will be of considerable interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences

Superdiversity

Superdiversity explores processes of diversification and the complex, emergent social configurations that now supersede prior forms of diversity in societies around the world. Migration plays a key role in these processes, bringing changes not just in social, cultural, religious and linguistic phenomena, but also in the ways that these phenomena combine with others like gender, age, and legal status. The concept of superdiversity has been adopted by scholars across the social sciences in order to address a variety of forms, modes and outcomes of diversification. Central to this field is the relationship between social categorization and social organization, including stratification and inequality. Increasingly complex categories of social ""difference"" have significant impacts across scales, from entire societies to individual identities. While diversification is often met with simplifying stereotypes, threat narratives, and expressions of antagonism, superdiversity encourages a perspective on difference as comprising multiple social processes, flexible collective meanings, and overlapping personal and group identities. A superdiversity approach encourages the re-evaluation and recognition of social categories as multidimensional, unfixed, and porous as opposed to views based on hardened, one-dimensional thinking about groups. Diversification and increasing social complexity are bound to continue, if not intensify, in light of climate change. This will have profound impacts on the nature of global migration, social relations, and inequalities. Superdiversity presents a convincing case for recognizing new social formations created by changing migration patterns and calls for a re-thinking of public policy and social scientific approaches to social difference.　 This introduction to the multidisciplinary concept of superdiversity will be of considerable interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences