Who Tweets in Italian? Demographic Characteristics of Twitter Users

In this paper we try for the first time to shed light on the use of Twitter by the Italian speaking users quantifying the total audience and some relevant characteristics: in particular, gender and location. The attempt is based on publicly available APIs data referring both to profile documents and tweets. Through real-time calculation is possible to infer the gender mainly using the name field of the users’ profile, while the geo-location is deduced using the location field and the geotagged tweets.