ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews key evidence about links between language use on social networks and personality profiling to find out how far it has advanced. Social network sites have become a ubiquitous aspect of the Internet and World Wide Web. Sites such as Facebook have accumulated membership communities almost on the scale of the entire Internet. For ordinary users, however, social network sites provided platforms from which they also could speak to wider audiences sharing their opinions and insights on issues of the day. For specialists interested in the significance of language as a signifier of personality, social network sites provided massive repositories of easily accessible natural language content produced by regular, everyday people talking about regular everyday things. Language styles sometimes differed according to the person with whom the participant was communicating. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count method was used to classify texts produced by a sample of Facebook users and uncovered specific language stylistic features.
