Consistency Across Geosocial Media Platforms

Abstract

The increasing use of geosocial media in research to draw quantitative and qualitative conclusions about urban environments bears questions about the consistency of the data across the different platforms. This paper therefore presents an initial comparative analysis of data from six different geosocial media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Google, Foursquare, Flickr, and Instagram) for Washington, D.C., using population and zoning data for reference. We find that there is little consistency between the different platforms at small spatial units and even semantically rich datasets have severe limitations when predicting functional zones in a city. The results show that researchers need to carefully evaluate which platform they can use for a particular study, and that more work is needed to better understand the differences between the different platforms.