Location inference

Last updated April 20, 2019

Location inference is the method of identifying the location profiles of users on social media platforms such as Twitter ^[1] and Facebook from their message content, friends' network and social interaction even when they did not explicitly disclose such on their account profiles or geotag their messages.

Social media are interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks. The variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available introduces challenges of definition; however, there are some common features:

Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.
User-generated content, such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions, is the lifeblood of social media.
Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.
Social media facilitate the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.

Twitter is an American online news and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7, 2017, this limit was doubled for all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through its website interface, through Short Message Service (SMS) or its mobile-device application software ("app"). Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California, and has more than 25 offices around the world.

Facebook, Inc. is an American online social media and social networking service company. It is based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. It is considered one of the Big Four technology companies along with Amazon, Apple, and Google.

Applications of location inference includes disaster management such as locating victims of earthquakes, consumer profiling for targeted advertising, tailored news content and for law enforcement such as detection of cyberbullying culprits.

Emergency management is the organization and management of the resources and responsibilities for dealing with all humanitarian aspects of emergencies. The aim is to reduce the harmful effects of all hazards, including disasters.

Targeted advertising is a form of online advertising that uses sophisticated methods to target the most receptive audiences with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting. These traits can either be demographic which are focused on race, economic status, sex, age, the level of education, income level and employment or they can be psychographic focused which are based on the consumer's values, personality, attitudes, opinions, lifestyles and interests. They can also be behavioral variables, such as browser history, purchase history, and other recent activity. Targeted advertising is focused on certain traits and the consumers who are likely to have a strong preference will receive the message instead of those who have no interest and whose preferences do not match a product's attribute. This eliminates wastage.

Cyberbullying or cyberharassment is a form of bullying or harassment using electronic means. Cyberbullying and cyberharassment are also known as online bullying. It has become increasingly common, especially among teenagers. Cyberbullying is when someone, typically teens, bully or harass others on social media sites. Harmful bullying behavior can include posting rumors, threats, sexual remarks, a victims' personal information, or pejorative labels. Bullying or harassment can be identified by repeated behavior and an intent to harm. Victims may have lower self-esteem, increased suicidal ideation, and a variety of emotional responses, including being scared, frustrated, angry, and depressed.

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A social networking service is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relations with other people who share similar personal or career interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections.

Mobile social networking (MSN) is social networking where individuals with similar interests converse and connect with one another through their mobile phone and/or tablet. Much like web-based social networking, mobile social networking occurs in virtual communities.

Microblogging is an online broadcast medium that exists as a specific form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller in both actual and aggregated file size. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links", which may be the major reason for their popularity. These small messages are sometimes called microposts.

Social network aggregation is the process of collecting content from multiple social network services, such as Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitch, YouTube, etc. into one unified presentation. The task is often performed by a social network aggregator, which pulls together information into a single location, or helps a user consolidate multiple social networking profiles into one profile. Various aggregation services provide tools or widgets to allow users to consolidate messages, track friends, combine bookmarks, search across multiple social networking sites, read RSS feeds for multiple social networks, see when their name is mentioned on various sites, access their profiles from a single interface, provide "lifestreams", etc. Social network aggregation services attempt to organize or simplify a user's social networking experience, although the idea has been satirized by the concept of a "social network aggregator aggregator".

Bebo was a social networking website launched in 2005, that now describes itself as "a company that dreams up ideas for fun social apps". Grant Denholm, the man behind the Bebo relaunch, has confirmed that the site will not be returning as a social network but as a company that makes social apps. The company launched the app Blab in early 2014, which closed in 2016. In December 2014 a new version of Bebo launched as an avatar hashtag messaging app.

A hashtag is a type of metadata tag used on social networks such as Twitter and other microblogging services, allowing users to apply dynamic, user-generated tagging which makes it possible for others to easily find messages with a specific theme or content. Users create and use hashtags by placing the number sign or pound sign # usually in front of a word or unspaced phrase in a message. The hashtag may contain letters, digits, and underscores. Searching for that hashtag will yield each message that has been tagged with it. A hashtag archive is consequently collected into a single stream under the same hashtag. For example, on the photo-sharing service Instagram, the hashtag #bluesky allows users to find all the posts that have been tagged using that hashtag.

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Although the terms e-marketing and digital marketing are still dominant in academia, social media marketing is becoming more popular for both practitioners and researchers. Most social media platforms have built-in data analytics tools, which enable companies to track the progress, success, and engagement of ad campaigns. Companies address a range of stakeholders through social media marketing, including current and potential customers, current and potential employees, journalists, bloggers, and the general public. On a strategic level, social media marketing includes the management of a marketing campaign, governance, setting the scope and the establishment of a firm's desired social media "culture" and "tone."

Google Buzz was a social networking, microblogging and messaging tool that was developed by Google which replaced Google Wave and integrated into their web-based email program, Gmail. Users could share links, photos, videos, status messages and comments organized in "conversations" and visible in the user's inbox.

Koprol, since 25 May 2010 called Yahoo Koprol, is an Indonesian social networking service, allowing users to connect based on location. Mobile users can use the site as a positioning service, without the need for a GPS receiver. Once logged in, users can see other members who were in nearby location.

The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is a service that helps users tired of MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, to "commit suicide in social networks", by automatically "removing their private content and friend relationships". The service is part of the non-profit foundation WORM, based in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Reblogging is the mechanism in blogging which allows users to repost the content of another user's post with an indication that the source of the post is another user.

Since the arrival of early social networking sites in the early 2000s, online social networking platforms have expanded exponentially, with the biggest names in social media in the mid-2010s being Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and SnapChat. The massive influx of personal information that has become available online and stored in the cloud has put user privacy at the forefront of discussion regarding the database's ability to safely store such personal information. The extent to which users and social media platform administrators can access user profiles has become a new topic of ethical consideration, and the legality, awareness, and boundaries of subsequent privacy violations are critical concerns in advance of the technological age.

Google+, sometimes pronounced as Google Plus, G+, or G-Plus, was an Internet-based social network owned and operated by Google Inc.. The network was launched on June 28, 2011 which replaced Google Buzz in the attempt to challenge other social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Myspace, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter and Vimeo and it was designed to link Google's products like Blogger and YouTube. However, these competitive plans by Google via Google Wave (2009–2010), Google Buzz (2010–2011) and Google+ (2011–2019) were never successful and were completely shut down as a result.

A brand page, in online social networking parlance, is a profile on a social networking website which is considered distinct from an actual user profile in that it is created and managed by at least one other registered user as a representation of a non-personal online identity. This feature is most used to represent the brands of organizations associated with, properties owned by, or general interests favored by a user of the hosting network.

Snapchat is a multimedia messaging app used globally, created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, former students at Stanford University, and developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc.

A social bot is an agent that communicates more or less autonomously on social media, often with the task of influencing the course of discussion and/or the opinions of its readers. It is related to chatbots but mostly only uses rather simple interactions or no reactivity at all. The messages it distributes are mostly either very simple, or prefabricated, and it often operates in groups and various configurations of partial human control (hybrid). It usually targets advocating certain ideas, supporting campaigns, or aggregating other sources either by acting as a "follower" and/or gathering followers itself. In this very limited respect, social bots can be said to have passed the Turing test. If the expectation is that behind every social media profile there should be a human, social bots always use fake accounts. This is not different from other social media API uses.

Mastodon is an online, self-hosted social media, and social networking service. It allows anyone to host their own server node in the network, and its various separately operated user bases are federated across many different sites. These instances are connected as a federated social network, allowing users from different instances to interact with each other seamlessly. Mastodon is a part of the wider Fediverse, allowing its users to also interact with users on different open platforms that support the same protocol, such as PeerTube and Friendica.

Social profiling is the process of constructing a user's profile using his or her publicly and voluntarily shared social data. In general, profiling refers to the data science process of generating a person's profile with computerized algorithms and technology. There are many mediums and platforms for sharing these information with the help of the increasing number of successful social networks, including but not limited to LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook and Twitter etc.

References

↑ Ajao, O.; Hong, J.; Liu, W. (2015-12-01). "A survey of location inference techniques on Twitter". Journal of Information Science. 41 (6): 855–864. arXiv: 1701.03639  . doi:10.1177/0165551515602847. ISSN 0165-5515.

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[1] Ajao, O.; Hong, J.; Liu, W. (2015-12-01). "A survey of location inference techniques on Twitter". Journal of Information Science. 41 (6): 855–864. arXiv: 1701.03639  . doi:10.1177/0165551515602847. ISSN 0165-5515.