It's a feeling familiar to anyone who lives an extremely online life. You spend all day on Twitter watching Howard Schultz get roasted and ratioed or retweeting all of the best definitions of the word "covfefe." Then you log off and enter the real world---the one where your spouse, your friends, your parents, and all the other people in your life who don't spend their days obsessively checking their mentions have precisely no idea what you're talking about, let alone why they should care.

Most of us know intuitively that Twitter is not an accurate reflection of the world we live in. It's more of a fun house mirror, distorting and exaggerating its subjects to sometimes funny, sometimes frightening effect. With just 126 million daily active users around the world, it's about one-third the size of the US population, but this self-selecting group can have a disproportionately large effect on the stories the media tells, the political candidates who rise to the top, and the broad sense of which ideas are gaining cultural acceptance---whether or not they truly are.

Now we have some more some data points to back up that gut feeling. On Wednesday, Pew Research released a report that compares Twitter users to the rest of the US population. Pew surveyed a nationally representative sample of 2,791 adult Twitter users about everything from their income and education to their thoughts on issues like race and immigration. They compared those responses to other studies on the broader American population. Survey respondents also shared their Twitter handles with Pew, which enabled the researchers to tap into Twitter's API and study the differences between the most and least prolific Twitter users in their sample.

"The comparison we wanted to make was: Are Twitter users different from the general public?" says Stefan Wojcik, who co-authored the report with his Pew colleague Adam Hughes. In a lot of cases, the answer was yes. The researchers found that in general, Twitter users are younger, wealthier, and better educated than the rest of the country. They're also more likely to lean left.

Pew Research Center

According to Pew's survey, nearly three-quarters of Twitter users are under the age of 49, compared to 54 percent of the US population. Fully 42 percent of Twitter users surveyed are college graduates, compared to 31 percent of the US population, and 41 percent of Twitter survey takers make more than $75,000 a year, compared to just 32 percent of Americans overall.