# Changes in Twitter geolocations: Insights and suggestions for future usage

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.12251 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12251/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Using Social Media Images for Building Function Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07315/) (2022)
- [Geo-Information Harvesting from Social Media Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00543/) (2022)
- [Where on Earth Do Users Say They Are?: Geo-Entity Linking for Noisy Multilingual User Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18784/) (2024)
- [Generating Synthetic Oracle Datasets to Analyze Noise Impact: A Study on Building Function Classification Using Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22856/) (2025)
- [The Geography of Information Diffusion in Online Discourse on Europe and Migration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13800/) (2024)
- [Coordinates from Context: Using LLMs to Ground Complex Location References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08741/) (2025)
- [Wisdom of the LLM Crowd: A Large Scale Benchmark of Multi-Label U.S. Election-Related Harmful Social Media Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11962/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Twitter data has become established as a valuable source of data for various application scenarios in the past years. For many such applications, it is necessary to know where Twitter posts (tweets) were sent from or what location they refer to. Researchers have frequently used exact coordinates provided in a small percentage of tweets, but Twitter removed the option to share these coordinates in mid-2019. Moreover, there is reason to suspect that a large share of the provided coordinates did not correspond to GPS coordinates of the user even before that. In this paper, we explain the situation and the 2019 policy change and shed light on the various options of still obtaining location information from tweets. We provide usage statistics including changes over time, and analyze what the removal of exact coordinates means for various common research tasks performed with Twitter data. Finally, we make suggestions for future research requiring geolocated tweets.