Rome, Paris and Lisbon are the world’s most attractive and influential world cities, which draw people from long distances, an analysis of Twitter data suggests.
While not all travellers have Twitter accounts, and those who do might not be very active on social media, the data collected suggests some cities are more influential than others in terms of human mobility.
The research, which will be published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, used the geo-location data of tweets to show the movements of Twitter users around the world.
The authors sought to explore how likely information could reach a certain distance from each starting location by word of mouth in a specified amount of time.
Researchers in France and Spain said their database contained 21,017,892 geo-located tweets written by 571,893 users for 1,000 days ending June 2013, excluding Twitter accounts from "non-humans".
The research looked at 58 world cities, including Sydney.
The researchers measured the distance between users’ first tweets in the time period, compared to the locations of later tweets, to measure how influential those starting cities were.
Differences in geography for more isolated cities, like Sydney and Beijing, were taken into account.
“With this correction, the top cities are Rome, Paris and Lisbon,” the research says.
“These cities are located in densely populated Europe but still manage to send travellers further away than any other, a proof for their aptitude as sources for the information spreading thought experiment.”
The researchers also counted the cities from which at least one tweet was posted, and defined that as coverage.
The charts below show the distance travelled from each starting city (a), with geographical effects like isolation considered (b), and the coverage of cities (c).
The same cities are big tourist destinations, the research says.
While people travel long distances from Sydney, the relative isolation of Sydney means it is not as influential, Twitter data suggests. Source: Royal Society Publishing
“Actually, all cities in the Top 10 set are also able to attract visitors at a worldwide scale, some are relatively far from other global cities and/or they may be the gate to extensive hinterlands (China)."
The chart below shows the cities’ attractiveness, based on how far visitors were willing to travel from.
Rome, Paris and Lisbon also have great pulling power, the Twitter data suggests. Source: Royal Society Publishing
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