How Literacy Rate, GDP (PPP) and Gender Constrain and Effect Social Contagion in Social Networking (Twitter)

Abstract

With the increasing demand for social media, it is becoming increasingly important to ask our self: How far and how fast does information spread in social media? Researchers have recently examined a number of factors that affect and constrain the social contagion and information diffusion in online social networks, including: the Literacy Rate, GDP (PPP) and Gender. This paper is an analysis study for proportion of women using social media, namely Twitter, and the effect of literacy rate, GDP (PPP) and country location. The study included many countries with a total of 926.371.680 Twitter users of whom 490.976.990 are women, which amounts to 53% percent are female users. The research found that the countries fall into three categories: first, fewer women than men use Twitter. Second category, almost equal number of women and men use Twitter. Third category, more women use Twitter than men. The research along with patents also, found that there is positive correlation between GDP (PPP) and female literacy rate when being considered in the analysis of the ratio of female to male social media users. Keywords: GDP (PPP), gender, literacy rate, social networks , twitter statistics.