Men over 30 outdo women with selfies

Study analyses pictures posted by Instagram users

LONDON: The act of posting selfies on social media is generally associated with the younger lot but a study indicates, in the age group of 30 and above, more men upload selfies on Instagram than women.

The team behind Selfiecity project that analyses thousands of Instagram pics from New York, London, Berlin, Moscow, Bangkok and Sao Paulo, studied 3,840 public photos, 640 from each city, and discovered that just 4% of the pictures on Instagram were actually selfies.

More than 80% of the selfies tagged in Moscow were taken by women, compared to just 55% in Bangkok, where the guys were clearly more cool about snapping a nice picture of themselves to show the world, the study said.



Young women dominated the trend in all the five major cities and selfies of young people were particularly abundant in Moscow.

The team combined AI analysis using the Orbeus ReKognition API with help from Amazon’s Mechanical Turks to help them establish the mood, pose and different features, like whether people are wearing glasses etc.



Combining different attributes, they found that just three men in the dataset, aged over 40, live in New York City and do not wear glasses.

According to the database, the general patterns in the facial expressions were happy and calm over grumpy, eyes open and mouths closed. 

Published in The Express Tribune, January 24^th, 2016.

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