The Effect of Twitter App Policy Changes on the Sharing of Spatial Information through Twitter Users

Social media data have been widely used to gain insight into human mobility and activity patterns. Despite their abundance, social media data come with various data biases, such as user selection bias. In addition, a change in the Twitter app functionality may further affect the type of information shared through tweets and hence influence conclusions drawn from the analysis of such data. This study analyzes the effect of three Twitter app policy changes in 2015, 2017, and 2019 on the tweeting behavior of users, using part of London as the study area. The policy changes reviewed relate to a function allowing to attach exact coordinates to tweets by default (2015), the maximum allowable length of tweet posts (2017), and the limitation of sharing exact coordinates to the Twitter photo app (2019). The change in spatial aspects of users’ tweeting behavior caused by changes in user policy and Twitter app functionality, respectively, is quantified through measurement and comparison of six aspects of tweeting behavior between one month before and one month after the respective policy changes, which are: proportion of tweets with exact coordinates, tweet length, the number of placename mentions in tweet text and hashtags per tweet, the proportion of tweets with images among tweets with exact coordinates, and radius of gyration of tweeting locations. The results show, among others, that policy changes in 2015 and 2019 led users to post a smaller proportion of tweets with exact coordinates and that doubling the limit of allowable characters as part of the 2017 policy change increased the number of place names mentioned in tweets. The findings suggest that policy changes lead to a change in user contribution behavior and, in consequence, in the spatial information that can be extracted from tweets. The systematic change in user contribution behavior associated with policy changes should be specifically taken into consideration if jointly analyzing tweets from periods before and after such a policy change.