There’s a lot of people tweeting about Cable News Shows — or, perhaps more precisely, tweeting at cable news shows about current events. But who are these people?
First, from the perspective of gender, let’s see who tweets to various cable news networks:
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We can see that CNN and Fox News draw the most male audiences, while E! and HLN are the most female audiences on Twitter. (Comedy Central is represented by The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, both of which, even if comedic, are daily news shows).
How old are the people talking about the various networks?
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E! News has the youngest crowd (all tweeting about One Direction, I think), while Fox and MSNBC have virtually identical, older crowds — flip sides of the same coin, I guess.
TL;DR
How is this all done? Not easily, unfortunately. One of the big challenges Twitter presents for anyone doing research is that Twitter does not publish any sort of age or gender information about its users. In fact, Twitter does not collect this information, so it’s not even a situation where it knows, like Facebook does, but is not sharing. Users are, for the most part, anonymous.
That doesn’t mean we can’t make educated guesses, however, about people on Twitter. As I detail here, you can make educated guesses about people’s gender by looking at their first names and bios. And as I detailed in this post, you can also make estimate of people’s ages by looking at when their first name was most popular (it’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it).
Neither of these is going to be terribly reliable with a small sample size, but when you start to look at hundreds of thousands of tweets (in this case, over 800K tweets), the law of large numbers will help to boost accuracy considerable. There are other assumptions that make the age data somewhat iffy in detail, but the relative positioning of the networks is fairly certain, if not a surprise.
There are also factors that skew the Twitter audience different from the viewing audience: most people don’t tweet, and so the active Twitter audience is self-selected. Many of the cable news shows are tightly identified with their anchors (e.g., Piers Morgan), and so many of the people who discuss the shows are reacting to the off-air (and on-Twitter) actions of the personalities (e.g., Piers’ discussing UK football). All that being said, the analysis begins to paint a picture of who is talking back to cable news on Twitter.
The data for this study was taken from all tweets mentioning Cable News shows from 12/11/13 through 12/17/13, which was slightly over 832,000 tweets.