Individuals’ income and economic inequalities can be traced through their social media posts.

Research suggests that the social media content people share online can reveal their socio-economic status, allowing user profiling. This applies not only to Nextdoor, but also to other online posting activity.

Knowing users’ income could allow social media platforms to provide income-based content recommendations, while advertisers and online shops could target customers based on their economic profile and offer specific products at varying prices based on income level.

Researchers have discovered major differences in the content shared online by people living in wealthier vs poorer neighborhoods, indicating that wealth inequality is expressed on social media. The researchers also found that people in more affluent neighborhoods had more positive posts, but were more likely to discuss crime, even in areas with lower crime rates than their poorer counterparts.

Dr. Ignacio Castro, lead researcher and Lecturer in Data Analytics at Queen Mary University of London, said, “Our study shows that the text posted by users in poor neighborhoods is distinguishable from the text generated in wealthier neighborhoods. Online users’ content reveals socioeconomic factors: in wealthier neighborhoods there is more crime-sensitive posting activity, but overall, more positive sentiment in the posts.”

These results are published in the Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, and are based on the first large-scale study of Nextdoor. Researchers examined 2.6 million posts from 64,283 neighborhoods in the United States and 3,325 neighborhoods in the United Kingdom, collected from November 2020 through September 2021. Nextdoor’s platform allows verified residents to share posts about their neighborhoods.

Residents of richer neighborhoods were more focused on crime, with the top 20% of neighborhoods discussing it approximately 1.5 times more often than the poorest neighborhoods, despite crime levels being 1.3 times higher in poorer areas.

Non-violent crimes were more frequently discussed than violent crimes, a pattern that was consistent across the US and UK study samples. However, UK users talked more about violent crimes in middle income areas than their US counterparts. In wealthier areas of the US, discussion of violent crimes and weapons was more frequent than among their counterparts in the UK.

 

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