Deviations of Check-ins and Human Mobility Trajectory

As the largest microblogging service in China, Weibo is not only an important social media but is also a source of human mobility data through its check-in service. We investigate the relationship between human mobility, Weibo accesses and check-in events using a large scale Weibo access dataset. Our findings indicate that the places where subscribers access Weibo only cover a small portion of their visited locations, and the number of Weibo accesses exhibits a long tail effect, indicating that some subscribers browse Weibo frequently. Check-ins not only deviate from individuals' daily routines, but they also provide a biased view of the actual location of subscribers. Therefore, relying on check-ins to infer human mobility patterns would lead to incorrect sociological conclusions.