U.S. Religious Landscape on Twitter

Religiosity is a powerful force shaping human societies, af-fecting domains as diverse as economic growth or the ability to cope with illness. As more religious leaders and organiza-tions as well as believers start using social networking sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook), online activities become important extensions to traditional religious rituals and practices. How-ever, there has been lack of research on religiosity in online social networks. This paper takes a step toward the under-standing of several important aspects of religiosity on Twitter, based on the analysis of more than 250k U.S. users who self-declared their religions/belief, including Atheism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. Specifically, (i) we examine the correlation of geographic distribution of reli-gious people between Twitter and offline surveys. (ii) We ana-lyze users ’ tweets and networks to identify discriminative fea-tures of each religious group, and explore supervised methods to identify believers of different religions. (iii) We study the linkage preference of different religious groups, and observe a strong preference of Twitter users connecting to others shar-ing the same religion