Got a lot of friends on Twitter?
If they are American or Brazilian, that's not so surprising, according to a study that checked the geographic codes on a sample of 4.5 million tweets sent between March 5 and March 13.
The study also found that you are likely to hear a lot from Indonesians, Brits, Mexicans and Malaysians — the remaining counties on the top 6 list. [ 'Twittamentary' Uses Twitter to Tell American Stories ]
This is just a rough picture, however. Less than 1 percent of tweets are "georeferenced" (a feature you have to activate), wrote researchers Mark Graham and Monica Stephens from the Oxford Internet Institute. And activity on Twitter may be artificially low due to censorship practices. Relatively few tweets came from China, for example, even though it has the world's largest population of Internet users.
But overall, Twitter is making it easier for people to get online given the ease of accessing the network (even a basic cellphone will do) and the high numbers of tweets from countries not considered to be in the tech vanguard. "[Twitter] might be allowing for a 'democratization' of information production and sharing because of its low barriers to entry and adaptability to mobile devices," the authors wrote.