#NoFilter.
Now more than ever, people must evaluate what kind of person they want to portray themselves as online. Even if you were the vodka-chugging champ of the night, posting a picture of yourself downing shots can haunt you forever. But if you feel the need to post pictures of your binge drinking escapades, at least one good thing may come of it — scientists can use your data to monitor underage drinking habits. The concept is somewhat creepy, but they hope to develop better prevention and intervention methods by exposing teen drinking patterns.
Before turning to Instagram, scientists used to just survey teens about their boozy habits, but that doesn’t always lead to the most accurate research. If teens are downing bottles of tequila at every party, it’s not very likely that they’ll own up to it to scientists. More likely, they’ll tone it down and claim to make wiser binge-drinking decisions than they do.
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However, using new technology to monitor teens’ photos, captions, and hashtags seems to paint a more honest picture of what really goes on at high school parties. Not only does it expose underage drinking patterns, but scientists can figure out which alcohol brands are favored by certain demographic groups. Plus, it’s cheaper and faster than the conventional survey method.
Researchers analyze the social media tags associated with the Instagram photos with a constructed internet slang dictionary. Since Instagram doesn’t provide age profiles, the technology actually detects which users are teens by applying computer vision techniques. With this method, the scientists were able to use computers to analyze the profile faces of Instagram users to accurately guess age, gender, and race.
The findings showed that, similarly to adult drinking, teens drank more on weekends, holidays, and at the end of the day. The researchers didn’t find a strong bias toward one gender for alcohol consumption. They did find, however, that some alcohol brands were followed more than others by teens, and that different genders followed different alcohol brands. This information could be used to distinguish which brands are attracting underage drinkers through social media, and provide a more comprehensive overview to those working with teens.
"We can keep government agencies or schools better informed and help them design interventions,” Jiebo Luo, professor of computer science at the University of Rochester, said in a press release. “We could also use social media to incorporate targeted intervention and to measure the effect of any intervention. And perhaps other things we haven't thought about."
So while future employers might not be too impressed with party pictures posted to Instagram, the posts can prove very useful to scientists. However, this new data mining method does shed light on how everything you publicly post online can be accessed or used by virtually anyone. In a technology-driven world, it’s more important than ever to think before you post.
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