Job Satisfaction Through the Lens of Social Media: Rural–Urban Patterns in the U.S.

Abstract We analyze a social-media-based indicator of expressed job-satisfaction for U.S. counties (2013–2023), derived from 2.6 billion geolocated tweets and validated against standard labor-market statistics. The indicator reveals a persistent rural disadvantage: sentiment is substantially lower in completely rural counties than in metropolitan or semi-urban ones. This gap is procyclical, widest under tight labor markets and narrowing as unemployment rises, a pattern consistent with urban sentiment tracking local labor-market conditions while deep-rural sentiment moves countercyclically. The result implies that tight labor markets amplify rural-urban disparities in perceived job quality, compounding the well-documented widening of income gaps. The fine spatial and temporal resolution of the social media indicator reveals dynamics in perceived job quality that aggregate or lower-frequency official statistics would miss.