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 »
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 »
Video: Is Democracy Over?
How Big Money, Big Media, Big Data, Bad Science and the Entertainmentization of Everything Are Undermining America Marty Kaplan, Norman Lear Center, USC 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 »