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 […] Read more »
How Twitter could predict elections: A rebuttal
The polling world was caught up in the buzz this week about research showing how to predict congressional elections using Twitter. … Does this portend the demise of traditional polling? Will Nate Silver need to totally revamp his approach to predicting elections? And will election night coverage devolve into flashing […] Read more »
Twitter Can’t Yet Predict Elections
The folks over at the Washington Post must have needed copy desperately for Monday’s opinion page if they were willing to publish a piece titled, “How Twitter can help predict an election.” In the column, Indiana University Sociologist Fabio Rojas asserts: “Twitter discussions are an unusually good predictor of U.S. […] Read more »
Big Buzz On Twitter Means Better Chances On Election Day
A new study suggests that candidates whose names were tweeted often — with good or bad comments — showed a stronger result in votes. Robert Siegel speaks with Fabio Rojas, assistant professor in Sociology at Indiana University Bloomington and a coauthor of the study. NPR News Read more »
More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior
Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? We answer this question using a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets from August 1 to November 1, 2010 and data from 406 competitive U.S. congressional elections provided by the Federal Election Commission. … With over 500 million active users in 2012, […] Read more »
How Twitter can help predict an election
… For nearly a century, conventional wisdom has argued that we can only truly know what the public thinks about an issue if we survey a random sample of adults. An entire industry is built on this view. … Digital democracy will put these campaign professionals out of work. New […] Read more »