What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?
Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
A tale of two sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the personality predictors of social media usage
Computers in Human Behavior
Determining credibility from social network structure
Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
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Because social network sites such as Twitter are increasingly being used to express opinions and attitudes, the utility of using these sites as legitimate and immediate information sources is of growing interest. This research examines how well information derived from social media aligns with that from more traditional polling methods. Specifically, this research examines tweets from over 40,000 Egyptian users from both before and after the Egyptian uprising on January 25, 2011 and compares that information with polling data collected by The Gallup Organization during the same time period. This analysis ascertains trends in sentiment and identifies the extent to which these methodologies align over time. The results show that trends across the two sources are not consistent. Focusing solely on Twitter data, individuals expressed increasingly negative opinions after the uprising, whereas survey results indicated that individuals were increasingly positive post-uprising. We discuss the implications of these differences for the use of social media as a real-time information source.