Information Privacy Opinions on Twitter: A Cross-Language Study
This work provides insights into cross-language differences in privacy opinions on social media, but it is incremental as it applies existing text analysis methods to a new dataset.
The study analyzed tweets in Spanish and English about the Cambridge Analytica scandal to understand global differences in information privacy framing, finding that English tweets emphasized privacy-related words associated with companies and data collection more than Spanish tweets.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal triggered a conversation on Twitter about data practices and their implications. Our research proposes to leverage this conversation to extend the understanding of how information privacy is framed by users worldwide. We collected tweets about the scandal written in Spanish and English between April and July 2018. We created a word embedding to create a reduced multi-dimensional representation of the tweets in each language. For each embedding, we conducted open coding to characterize the semantic contexts of key concepts: "information", "privacy", "company" and "users" (and their Spanish translations). Through a comparative analysis, we found a broader emphasis on privacy-related words associated with companies in English. We also identified more terms related to data collection in English and fewer associated with security mechanisms, control, and risks. Our findings hint at the potential of cross-language comparisons of text to extend the understanding of worldwide differences in information privacy perspectives.