Cross-platform and cross-interaction study of user personality based on images on Twitter and Flickr

PLoS One. 2018 Jul 11;13(7):e0198660. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0198660. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Assessing the predictive value of different social media platforms is important to understand the variation in how users reveal themselves across multiple platforms. Most social media platforms allow users to interact in multiple ways: by posting content to the platform, liking others' posts, or building a user profile. While prior studies offer insights into how language use differs across platforms, differences in image usage is less well understood. In this study, we analyzed variation in image content with user personality across three interaction types (posts, likes and profile images) and two platforms, using a unique data set of users who are active on both Twitter and Flickr. Usage patterns on these two social media platforms revealed different aspects of users' personality. Cross-platform data fusion is thus shown to improve personality prediction performance.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Color
  • Humans
  • Online Social Networking*
  • Pattern Recognition, Visual / classification
  • Personality*
  • Social Media / statistics & numerical data*

Associated data

  • figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.6469577

Grants and funding

LHU acknowledges the support of the Templeton Religion Trust, grant TRT-0048. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.