Does Twitter know your gender?
No, but computers have proven surprisingly accurate at figuring out whether tweets are from men or women, a study shows.
That’s the conclusion of a recent study cited by Fast Company and the Macmillan Dictionary blog.
The study examined “gender-skewed words”—vocabulary used by one sex (mostly women) more than the other. And it found, in Fast Company’s words, that “you can’t keep your secrets from Twitter.
The paper from the Mitre Corporation, titled “Discriminating Gender on Twitter,” demonstrates that thinking machines can often figure out a person’s gender on Twitter just by reading their tweets.
“And such knowledge is power: the findings could be useful to advertisers and others,” Fast Company says.
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