Harvard Study Suggests Twitter Users Are Self-Obsessed, Says Harvard’s Own Tweet

A study released this week by a Harvard University professor and a graduate student told many who use Twitter what they may already know: The network is dominated by a few tweeters talking about themselves, much more so than other social networks.

The university, as if in a hurry to support this observation, was quick to trumpet the research on its own Twitter feed, @Harvard Research.

The study, published by Harvard Business Publishing, looked at a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users last month and then compared them with users of other social networks. It found that the top 10 percent of the social network’s most active users accounted for about 90 percent of all tweets, and most of those users were men.

On other online social networks, the study says, the top 10 percent of users account for 30 percent of all production. And on Wikipedia, the top 15 percent of the most active editors account for about 90 percent of its content. Researchers say this may indicate that Twitter isn’t as much about communicating back and forth as it is about posting personal ideas or thoughts.

“This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network,” the study said.

Researchers also concluded that 80 percent of users are followed by or follow at least one other user. Men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, but men have 15 percent more followers than women; and an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman.

This “follower split” led researchers to conclude that women are not driven as much by followers as men are, or are more selective when they are deciding whether to reciprocate a Twitter friendship.

But not everyone is sold on the research – several bloggers have said researchers were too quick to make conclusions about the new, and often misunderstood, social platform.

On his blog called A Fire Under Embers, Zachary Tumin, a program director at Harvard, said the study would benefit from real-life observation of people using Twitter, which could answer lingering questions about who users they chose to follow, and why.

For example, he writes, some users keep their gender identity ambiguous, which would skew some of the study’s gender conclusions. He also writes that the study doesn’t take other biases into account, such as whether or not a user would follow someone in a different profession or religion, or with different interests than their own. —Erica R. Hendry