Tweets are forever: A large-scale quantitative analysis of deleted tweets

Hazim Almuhimedi, Shomir Wilson, Bin Liu, Norman Sadeh, Alessandro Acquisti

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

70 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper describes an empirical study of 1.6M deleted tweets collected over a continuous one-week period from a set of 292K Twitter users. We examine several aggregate properties of deleted tweets, including their connections to other tweets (e.g., whether they are replies or retweets), the clients used to produce them, temporal aspects of deletion, and the presence of geotagging information. Some significant differences were discovered between the two collections, namely in the clients used to post them, their conversational aspects, the sentiment vocabulary present in them, and the days of the week they were posted. However, in other dimensions for which analysis was possible, no substantial differences were found. Finally, we discuss some ramifications of this work for understanding Twitter usage and management of one's privacy.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCSCW 2013 - Proceedings of the 2013 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Pages897-907
Number of pages11
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Event2013 2nd ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW 2013 - San Antonio, TX, United States
Duration: Feb 23 2013Feb 27 2013

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW

Other

Other2013 2nd ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Antonio, TX
Period2/23/132/27/13

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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