Can Facebook show the real characteristics of people? Canadian researchers made a study on this issue recently. They said that after analyzing the information people provide in Facebook and Twitter, it doesn't show the true behavior of people. IANS said in a report.
To understand the real behavior of human researchers has analyzed the behavior of people, online and offline. Using data mining method, they found the information given in Facebook and Twitter may give seriously wrong idea about particular human's behavior.
Every year, thousands of research paper are made from collecting information from different social networking sites. So, researchers this recent results about human behavior could have made major implications in such kind of researches.
The article published in the journal Science.
Assistant professor at McGill University in Canada Derek Ruths said, "Publicly available data feeds used in social media research do not always provide an accurate representation of the platform's overall data - and researchers are generally in the dark about when and how social media providers filter their data streams," he added "A large number of spammers and bots, which masquerade as normal users on social media, get mistakenly incorporated into many measurements and predictions of human behavior,"
Study co-author Jurgen Pfeffer of Carnegie Mellon University's Institute for Software Research said, "For instance, on Facebook the absence of a "dislike" button makes negative responses to content harder to detect than positive "likes,"
For example, efforts to infer political orientation of Twitter users achieve barely 65 percent accuracy for typical users - even though studies (focusing on politically active users). The authors resisted by claiming 90 percent exactitude.
"The common thread in all these issues is the need for researchers to be more acutely aware of what they are actually analysing when working with social media data," Ruths concluded.
