A group of sociologists at Indiana University recently claimed to have shown that “tweets predict elections.” The research looks at the proportion of tweets during the 3 months preceding the 2010 election mentioning either the democratic or republican candidate in a house race that mentioned the Republican candidate, and uses that ratio to predict the election outcome. In an Op-Ed published in The Washington Post claiming to describe the research, Fabio Rojas, one of the authors claimed that “In the 2010 data, our Twitter data predicted the winner in 404 out of 406 competitive races.” Really? [cont.]
Jonathan Nagler (NYU), The Monkey Cage