New machine learning algorithm can predict age and gender from just your Twitter profile

A new "demographic inference" tool developed by academics can make predictions based solely on the information in a person's social media profile (i.e. The tool--which works in 32 languages--could pave the way for views expressed on social media to be factored in to popular survey methods. Researchers at the University of Oxford, University of Michigan, University of Massachusetts, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, the Max Planck Institute, and Stanford University have developed a method to infer information about a social media account owner based on the information disclosed in their Twitter profile information. A new machine learning system --unveiled at the Web Conference in San Francisco this week--learned the patterns associated with different ages, genders, and between organisations and individuals from a data set of over four million Twitter accounts in 32 languages. This information was then combined with estimated locations and re-weighted against census data to produce more accurate estimates of population in 1,101 statistical regions across the EU.