Excuse the pun, but the polling world is all “atwitter” about a University of Indiana professor’s claim that the social media platform Twitter will “undermine the polling industry” and that analyzing social media conversations will put campaign pollsters “out of work.” … Pushback from the polling world has been swift […] Read more »
How Not To Publicize Your Research
Much has been written over the past week about the DiGrazia et al. paper showing a relationship between a candidate’s tweet share and vote share and the Fabio Rojas op/ed in the Washington Post plugging it. I don’t want to get into a critique of the paper’s methods or findings, […] Read more »
#FF Polling
There’s a new study out purporting to show that Twitter mentions are just as good as polling in predicting elections. I’m skeptical, and regardless of the study’s findings, the truth is that good survey research—whether for campaigns, news organizations, or academic research—does far more than predict winners. [cont.] Jonathan Bernstein, […] Read more »
No, You Can’t Predict US Congressional Election Outcomes with Tweet Shares: But That Doesn’t Mean You Shouldn’t Try
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 »