#greysanatomy vs. #yankees: Demographics and Hashtag Use on Twitter

Abstract

Demographics, in particular, gender, age, and race, are a key predictor of human behavior. Despite the significant effect that demographics plays, most scientific studies using online social media do not consider this factor, mainly due to the lack of such information. In this work, we use state-of-the-art face analysis software to infer gender, age, and race from profile images of 350K Twitter users from New York. For the period from November 1, 2014 to October 31, 2015, we study which hashtags are used by different demographic groups. Though we find considerable overlap for the most popular hashtags, there are also many group-specific hashtags.