Wearing Many (Social) Hats:
How Different are Your Different Social Network Personae?


Abstract

This paper investigates when users create profiles in different social networks, whether they are redundant expressions of the same persona, or they are adapted to each platform. Using the personal webpages of 116,998 users on About.me, we identify and extract matched user profiles on several major social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. We find evidence for distinct site-specific norms, such as differences in the language used in the text of the profile self-description, and the kind of picture used as profile image. By learning a model that robustly identifies the platform given a user’s profile image (0.657–0.829 AUC) or self-description (0.608–0.847 AUC), we confirm that users do adapt their behaviour to individual platforms in an identifiable and learnable manner. However, different genders and age groups adapt their behaviour differently from each other, and these differences are, in general, consistent across different platforms. We show that differences in social profile construction correspond to differences in how formal or informal the platform is.






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About.me Dataset

An anonymized version of the about.me dataset in out paper is being made available to the research community. If you are interested in using this data, please send us an email according to the Request Dataset section and indicate which of following parts you need in the email.

  1. Profile image features from Face++ and Microsoft Oxford API: In JSON format, we provide Face detection features for profile images from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, About.me and Flickr.

  2. Profile image deep learning features.

You can find the format of the dataset from here.


Request Dataset


If you are interested in using this data, please fill the form to to get the link where you can download the data.

We are sharing the dataset under the terms and conditions specified here (link). Please note that submitting the form indicates that you accept the terms and conditions of the data. In the form, please indicate which part of the dataset you need. If you do not get any email notification for your logged request within 24 hours, please e-mail us at netsys.noreply[at]gmail.com.

Dataset Terms and Conditions

  1. You will use the data solely for the purpose of non-profit research or non-profit education.

  2. You will respect the privacy of end users and organizations that may be identified in the data. You will not attempt to reverse engineer, decrypt, de-anonymize, derive or otherwise re-identify anonymized information.

  3. You will not distribute the data beyond your immediate research group.

  4. If you create a publication using our datasets, please cite our papers as follows. 


@inproceedings{icwsm2017zhong,
  title = {Wearing Many (Social) Hats: How Different are Your Different Social Network Personae?},
  booktitle = {The 11th International {AAAI} Conference on Weblogs and Social Media ({ICWSM17)}},
  author = {Zhong, Changtao and Chang, Hau-wen and Karamshuk, Dmytro and Lee, Dongwon and Sastry, Nishanth},
  year = {2017},
  month = {May},
  address = {Montreal, Canada}
}