Social media content shared today in cities, such as Instagram images, their tags and descriptions, is the key form of contemporary city life. It tells people where activities and locations that interest them are and it allows them to share their urban experiences and self-representations. Therefore, any analysis of urban structures and cultures needs to consider social media activity. In our paper, we introduce the novel concept of social media inequality. This concept allows us to quantitatively compare patterns in social media activities between parts of a city, a number of cities, or any other spatial areas. We define this concept using an analogy with the concept of economic inequality. Economic inequality indicates how some economic characteristics or material resources, such as income, wealth or consumption are distributed in a city, country or between countries. Accordingly, we can define social media inequality as the measure of the distribution of characteristics from social media content shared in a particular geographic area or between areas. An example of such characteristics is the number of photos shared by all users of a social network such as Instagram in a given city or city area, or the content of these photos. We propose that the standard inequality measures used in other disciplines, such as the Gini coefficient, can also be used to characterize social media inequality. To test our ideas, we use a dataset of 7,442,454 public geo-coded Instagram images shared in Manhattan during five months (March-July) in 2014, and also selected data for 287 Census tracts in Manhattan. We compare patterns in Instagram sharing for locals and for visitors for all tracts, and also for hours in a 24-hour cycle. We also look at relations between social media inequality and socio-economic inequality using selected indicators for Census tracts.
Pre-Construction of Opinion Dynamics Considering Structural Inequality: Interdisciplinary Analysis of Complex Social Stratification, Media Influence, and Functionalism
Job Satisfaction Through the Lens of Social Media: Rural--Urban Patterns in the U.S
Harvard University, Institute for Quantitative Social Science（哈佛大学，定量社会科学研究所）；Department of Law, Economics and Culture, University of Insubria（因斯布鲁克大学法律、经济与文化系）
Social Media Reveals Urban-Rural Differences in Stress across China
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Bern（伯尔尼大学）；Indian Institute of Technology, Jammu（印度理工学院查谟分校）
Two Americas of Well-Being: Divergent Rural-Urban Patterns of Life Satisfaction and Happiness from 2.6 B Social Media Posts
Institute for Quantitative Social Science（定量社会科学研究所）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Department of Law, Economics and Culture（法律、经济与文化系）；University of Insubria（因斯布里亚大学）
A Contextual Master-Slave Framework on Urban Region Graph for Urban Village Detection
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Guangzhou HKUST Fok Ying Tung Research Institute（广州香港科技大学霍英东研究院）
