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Language use on Twitter reflects social structure and social disparities
1University of Basel, Switzerland.
Heliyon
|January 31, 2024
Summary
Social media language, particularly indicators of depression, reflects area deprivation and ethnic minority status. These linguistic markers can help prioritize public health efforts in disadvantaged communities.
Area of Science:
- Computational Social Science
- Public Health
- Psychology
Background:
- Mental health assessments increasingly use social media data.
- Minority group membership and social disparity impact mental health.
- The manifestation of these factors in social media language is not fully understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the association between social media language, social disparity, and ethnic minority status.
- To determine if linguistic indicators of mental health on social media correlate with county-level social factors.
Main Methods:
- Spatial lag regressions were used to analyze county-level data.
- Examined associations between lexical indicators of depression (e.g., first-person singular pronouns, negative emotions) and social disparity markers (e.g., Area Deprivation Index-3, ethnic minority percentage).
- Utilized a dataset of approximately 30 million geo-coded tweets aggregated at the U.S. county level.
Main Results:
- County-level lexical indicators of depression were positively associated with area disparity and the percentage of ethnic minority groups.
- Predictive validity checks indicated that lexical indicators correlate with future health and mental health outcomes.
- Linguistic markers of depression and adjustment from tweets showed significant associations with socio-economic and demographic factors.
Conclusions:
- Social media language, specifically indicators of depression, reflects underlying social disparities and ethnic minority concentrations at the county level.
- These linguistic indicators show predictive validity for health outcomes.
- Lexical indicators from social media data can aid in prioritizing public health campaigns, especially in socially deprived areas.
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