When is it biased?: assessing the representativeness of twitter's streaming API

Fred Morstatter, Jürgen Pfeffer, Huan Liu

Abstract: Twitter shares a free 1% sample of its tweets through the "Streaming API". Recently, research has pointed to evidence of bias in this source. The methodologies proposed in previous work rely on the restrictive and expensive Firehose to find the bias in the Streaming API data. We tackle the problem of finding sample bias without costly and restrictive Firehose data. We propose a solution that focuses on using an open data source to find bias in the Streaming API.