The next 100 days count – and Twitter is counting our sentiments and online interactions to gauge the potential outcome of the presidential campaign in the U.S.: Today, Twitter launched a new site called the Twitter Political Index. According to the Twitter blog, the @gov team is analyzing the +2 million tweets every week to understand how the nation’s Twitter users feel about President Obama and his challenger Romney.
The index represents:
Twitter teams up with USAToday’s election team and Topsy to display the sentiment results in the newspaper’s Election Meter. The sentiments are measured on a 0 to 100 scale and everything above 50 is coded as positive sentiment. A sliding scale lets users go back in time and shows sentiments including their related historical events (such as important visits, or speeches):
Adam Sharp, Twitter’s head of news and social innovation (@gov), shared some of the ideas and analysis mechanisms on NYT’s Timescast on August 2. Asked how Twindex represents the American public, he responded on Twitter:
@InesMergel #Twindex avg for 2 cands since 5/1 w/in 1 point of each other. That + frequent Gallup correlation gives us confidence in balance—
Adam Sharp (@AdamS) August 03, 2012
I was interviewed for our local channel 9 News to talk about #Twindex: PollstePollsters using social media sites to gauge popularity of candidatesrs
Related articles:
- WashingtonPost.com: Introducing the Twitter Political Index!
- NationalJournal: Twitter will gauge voter sentiment in new venture.
Interesting. Is there any evidence that twitter users’ sentiments reflect those of voters?
I guess you can interpret sentiment = preference for a candidate = likelihood to vote for the preferred candidate.
Yes, but twitter users may not be a representative sample. I’d guess they are not. I’m not sure the direction of the bias, but I’d be interested in knowing before inferring anything from this experiment.
I agree, especially because the % of Twitter users among online adults in the U.S. is very small (15%) and only 8% come back every day (http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Twitter-Use-2012/Findings.aspx) . We won’t know until November 6 though.
Adam Sharp, Twitter’s Government lead, responded in a tweet to me the following (https://twitter.com/AdamS/status/231190305259532290): “@InesMergel #Twindex avg for 2 cands since 5/1 w/in 1 point of each other. That + frequent Gallup correlation gives us confidence in balance”. I still have difficulty understanding how they justify that Twindex represents the American public. Here is a link to the NYT timecast where he was asked the same question: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/timescast-politics-a-preview-of-the-jobs-report/