Analyzing the Credibility of the Location Information Provided by Twitter Users

We have observed huge success in social network services like Facebook and Twitter, and many researchers have done their analysis on these services. As massive data observed by users is produced on Twitter, many researchers have been conducting research to detect an event on Twitter. Some of them developed a system to detect the earthquakes or to find the local festivals. However, they did not consider the credibility of location information on Twitter although their systems were using the location information. In this paper, we analyze the credibility of the profile location and the correlation between the spatial attributes on Twitter as the preliminary research of the event detection system on Twitter. We analyzed 0.5 million Twitter users in Korea and 2.8 million users around the world. 49.73% of the users in Korea and 90.64% of the users in the world posted tweets in their profile locations. This paper will be helpful to understand the credibility of the spatial attributes on Twitter when the researchers develop an application using them.