Why Watching Movie Tweets Won't Tell the Whole Story?

Abstract

Data from Online Social Networks (OSNs) are providing analysts with an unprecedented access to public opinion on elections, news, movies etc. However, caution must be taken to determine whether and how much of the opinion extracted from OSN user data is indeed reflective of the opinion of the larger online population. In this work we study this issue in the context of movie reviews on Twitter and compare the opinion of Twitter users with that of the online population of IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. We introduce new metrics to show that the Twitter users can be characteristically different from general users, both in their rating and their relative preference for Oscar-nominated and non-nominated movies. Additionally, we investigate whether such data can truly predict a movie's box-office success.