Twitter use influenced by social schedules

Washington

Twitter usage largely mirrors daily work schedules and school calendars, an analysis of data on the social networking site from the US shows.

The data reflects the amount of "social jet lag" caused when social demands make people wake up much earlier than their biological rhythms would prefer, said researchers from the University of Chicago in the US.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, analysed the Twitter activity of more than 246,000 users from 2012 to 2013 to look for daily patterns of usage.

The tweets were tagged with geographic location data from more than 1,500 counties in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. 

The data serve as a proxy for people's sleep and wake times, a public record of sorts that shows when someone is awake and still using Twitter.

Across the US, there is a daily slowdown in tweets at night when most people go to bed.

The researchers saw that this nighttime lull shifts to later times on weekends relative to weekdays, a phenomenon they call "Twitter social jet lag."  

The magnitude of this shift, which is the amount of time someone stays up later or sleeps in on the weekend, varies across the country and with the seasons.

The West Coast experiences less Twitter social jet lag than the rest of the US.

Most counties see the largest amount of social jet lag in February, and the lowest in June or July.

The study also shows that these shifts tend to coincide with relaxed social schedules due to  school holidays and summer breaks, rather than the seasonal effects on the amount of daylight. 

Without early school drop-offs and bus schedules to dictate wake up times, parents and students tend to sleep in — and start tweeting — later in the day, probably more in line with their natural circadian rhythms.

"We started the study expecting it to be a solar or seasonal effect — that your internal clock will shift in the summer and that will lead to decreases in social jet lag," said Aaron Dinner, professor at the University of Chicago.

"But in fact, that's not what we found at all. People get up later on weekdays in the summer because their social constraints are relaxed. Weekend behaviour — and presumably a person's biological clock — does not change much over the year in most counties," Dinner said.

Lack of sufficient sleep and poor sleep schedules have been linked to numerous health problems, including obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The patterns of Twitter activity also tracked with obesity rates.

Counties with higher levels of social jet lag correlated with higher rates of obesity, researchers said.

Information about sleep schedules also correlated with data from conventional sleep studies where people report how much sleep they get on a nightly basis, they said. — PTI