Twitter: A Content Analysis Of Personal Information

Social media provide many opportunities to connect people, but the kinds of personally identifiable information that people share through social media is understudied. This paper presents findings from a content analysis in which we coded the amount and kinds of personally identifiable information of public Twitter messages. Overwhelmingly, public Twitter messages do not include identifiable information such as phone numbers, email, and home addresses. Using Goffman's [(1963). Behaviors in public places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings. New York, NY: Free Press] concepts of public order and civil inattention, we also coded for whether people articulate the kinds of information that are communicated with others in public space, including locational, temporal, and activity-related information. Our findings suggest that people do share similar kinds of personal information on Twitter that they do in others kinds of physical public spaces, suggesting that people may also be mapping old practices for public social interaction onto networked publics.