Analyzing Elderly Behavior in Social Media Through Language Use

Abstract

Increasingly more elderly make use of social media in the Netherlands, being at the forefront compared to other European countries. We analyze the language use of Dutch (older) adults in Twitter in order to get insights in their behavior. Previous studies have identified several linguistic features that change as life progresses including pronouns. We don't find this change and we claim that this might be due to the fact that the users tend to adapt to the language of the platform. This is not the case for the topics addressed since we find differences in the use of hashtags, while the elderly use hashtags mainly in relation to leisure and politics, the younger users employ them mainly in relation to their working life.

Sustainable Development and ICT Use Among Elderly: A Comparison Between the Netherlands and Italy

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Shaping an alternative smart city discourse through Twitter: Amsterdam and the role of creative migrants

“…The Twitter analysis of the creative migrants has focused on hashtags since they are a relevant source of information employed to index keywords or topics that are of interest to the user (Monachesi & de Leeuw, 2018;Pandya, Mourad, Monachesi, Kostakos, & Loven, 2018). (Hash-)tags are added by users to their tweets, they are a way to add metadata to shared content and highlight the debate that is being carried out in the platform: people are thus able to follow topics that interest them in an easy way (Bruns & Burgess, 2011;Golder & Huberman, 2006).…”

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“…their number has been included in [4]), their content has not been considered. We contend that hashtags and URLs in tweets are indicative of users' age since they reflect users' interests and activities [1]. We propose a novel method to derive relevant features from hashtags and URLs and incorporate these into our CNN-based classification model.…”