Who is bragging more online? A large scale analysis of bragging in social media

Publication type
C1
Publication status
Published
Authors
Jin, M., Preoţiuc-Pietro, D., Doğruöz, A.S., & Aletras, N.
Editor
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti and Nianwen Xue
Series
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Pagination
17575-17587
Publisher
ELRA and ICCL (Torino, Italia)
Conference
2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) (Turin, Italy)
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Abstract

Bragging is the act of uttering statements that are likely to be positively viewed by others and it is extensively employed in human communication with the aim to build a positive self-image of oneself. Social media is a natural platform for users to employ bragging in order to gain admiration, respect, attention and followers from their audiences. Yet, little is known about the scale of bragging online and its characteristics. This paper employs computational sociolinguistics methods to conduct the first large scale study of bragging behavior on Twitter (U.S.) by focusing on its overall prevalence, temporal dynamics and impact of demographic factors. Our study shows that the prevalence of bragging decreases over time within the same population of users. In addition, younger, more educated and popular users in the U.S. are more likely to brag. Finally, we conduct an extensive linguistics analysis to unveil specific bragging themes associated with different user traits.