A review by lesserjoke
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

4.0

A Freakonomics for the modern age, this book explores the provocative notion that we can get more reliable information from people's Google searches and other online activity than from their answers to traditional polling questions. Author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz argues convincingly that people sometimes respond to surveys with the answers they consider socially expected or even aspirational, but they are less motivated to filter themselves before a search engine that can bring them whatever they ask of it. As a result, aggregate big data can provide insights on racism, political trends, sexual proclivities, and other sensitive topics that classical research methods might miss.

I did sometimes wish that the author had consulted more linguists for his discussions of language-related studies, but that's a larger critique for the text-as-data research field as a whole. Overall, I thought he made some sharp points about the research avenues opened up by big data, as well as the ways that the internet in particular can reveal discrepancies between who we claim to be and who we really are.