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Twitter Launches Political Index
colinneagle writes "Twitter today launched a new tool that leverages its estimated 400 million daily Tweets to gauge public opinion on the candidates for the 2012 presidential election. Progress in political polling is long overdue, and with Twitter providing a constant, international conversation for web users to join or leave at their own will, there may not be a better time than now to make that change. However, there are some concerns. One of the interesting points made in Twitter's description of its new tool is where it claims to be 'illustrating instances when unprompted, natural conversation deviates from responses to specific survey questions.' That assumes conversation on Twitter is natural. If parody accounts, Twitter trolls, and spam bots have taught us anything (and they usually don't), it's that Twitter conversation can be manipulated just as easily as it can be used naturally. How will Twitter distinguish between positive Tweets coming from voters or news outlets and those from spam bots designed to drive the conversation surrounding a candidate one way or the other? How easy could it be for an organization with a vested interest in positive poll numbers for one candidate to craft an army of Twitter bots designed to drive Barack Obama's positive numbers down, or vice versa? How many people reading the data, which is sure to make its way to TV news as election coverage increases in the coming months, will be aware that Tweets can be manipulated?"
If they have a bleeding story, no matter how fabricated or skewed it is, they'll run it.
If they don't, they'll simply be trumped by everyone else who WILL.
News agencies today are struggling under the lack of actual news-worthy content and feel the need to exploit ever more dubiously "newsworthy" events to fake the appearance of relevance.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What use is a index, that is only taken from 40+ men in their midlife crisis, PR/marketing companies and other groups that want to look "hip" and "with the young people"?
Nobody who's actually young, uses it. Ever.
Oh wait... It's not supposed to show the political climate, but create it. My bad.
How will Twitter distinguish between positive Tweets coming from voters or news outlets and those from spam bots designed to drive the conversation surrounding a candidate one way or the other?
There's a difference? /s
0 1 - just my two bits
The real story here is that someone actually thinks posts on Twitter represent anything other than the mad ramblings of a fringe margin of society.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Fox News's darling for collecting poll data about political events is Rasmussen Reports. In Rasmussen Reports's methodology, they make a series of random, pre-recorded calls to landline telephones. One sensible theory says that people who still have landline phones, and who take the time to do an automated random phone poll, tend to be older and retired. These people typically vote conservatively, thus causing Rasmussen's findings to be skewed conservatively.
Likewise, any sort of "polling" of Twitter results will probably not be statistically interesting, because not everyone uses Twitter. I find it utterly unsurprising that Twitter people discuss Obama far more frequently than Romney. However I don't think that these numbers can be extrapolated to the general election in any way.
A friend of mine just got a job doing some sophisticated, geo-ip indexed analysis of trending hashtags, which can be used for remarkably sophisticated real time marketing analysis. I don't know all the details because they're secret and he can't tell me too much but I know they can figure out in real time what is on the minds of people in various geographic areas. This can easily also be used for political analysis.
I'd also like to know how they would rate this following tweet (note: this is not my opinion on something, it's made up to illustrate a point):
Oh THANK GOD for Obamacare, now instead of barely making mortgage payments, I can pay for my neighbor's cancer treatments and default on my loans!
Clearly sarcasm but the first sentence fragment could easily be construed as positive or pro Obama by an unknown natural language parser. From the article:
Each day, the Index evaluates and weighs the sentiment of Tweets mentioning Obama or Romney relative to the more than 400 million Tweets sent on all other topics. For example, a score of 73 for a candidate indicates that Tweets containing their name or account name are on average more positive than 73 percent of all Tweets.
And what exactly does that tell me? That people are telling Romney where to shove his money or that they genuinely want to see him in office?
My work here is dung.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a marketing robot that has cloned itself 50,000 times on hundreds of internet forums and social media websites.
Nanu, nanu.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
What I wouldn't do for a "+1, Sad But True"
How many people reading the data, which is sure to make its way to TV news as election coverage increases in the coming months, will be aware that Tweets can be manipulated?
My estimate is rough, but I would put it well under 20%, based on conversations about the topic with average non-technical people.
This is an example of one of the indirect perils of centralized communications. Even without the central authority controlling the content, the power implicit in comm centralization becomes a weapon against the free mind. If we don't replace Twitter, Facebook, G+, Hotmail, and the rest with decentralized alternatives, our society will increasingly be influenced by entities with the means and desire to alter public opinion.
We need to be running the chat servers, photo buckets, and mail servers used by our friends and family who are less technically skilled. We need to get Diaspora (or a competitor) nodes running on a much larger scale. I am doing some, and I am scaling up as quickly as I can.
Decentralized comm does not magically and completely solve the problem, but at least it would not serve up the means to manipulate public opinion on a silver platter.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Hmm, maybe they could, I dunno, engage in actual journalism or something, instead of echoing press releases? That might help.
Now whichever candidate loses the election can lament that he won the popular Twitter vote!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
A much better predictor is betting odds. Beats polls and any other index I have seen. As for the quality of twitter as a gauge of opinion, they just face a normal page rank problem. The weight of a quote about a candidate is determined by the rank of the account and the number of tweets from that account. The rank of the account depends on the followers and their rank, with validated accounts in the top. I didn't read tfa but it would surprise me if an algorithm like this isn't used. An army of bots would only have bots as followers. Just like splogs and other "ring" spam web sites. Deciding whether a tweet is good or bad is difficult. If you can't sense e.g. sarcasm in political tweets you will miss by a large margin. Doing that from 140 chars (plus history) would be a more impressive feat than using I for political indexes.
Yes, there are two candidates with a realistic chance to win, but there are more than two candidates in the election. I was actually a bit surprised when I went to the site and only saw Obama and Romney on there, with no mention at all of Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. So, I guess I need to reevaluate my understanding of where Twitter falls in relation to mainstream media outlets. It's apparently a lot closer than I thought.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
Because until the US switches to Ranked Choice Voting only 2 parties can ever be competitive.
I hear this type of argument all the time. It's like excluding a candidate from the debates because their poll numbers aren't high enough. Did anyone ever consider that if they were included, their poll numbers would be higher? Case in point was Jesse Ventura who won as an independent in Minnesota. Getting into the gubernatorial debates was a key part of his being able to win.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The purpose of news outlets is to sell advertising. The people who would be willing to absorb, understand and think about in-depth reporting are also the people who are likely to question the claims of the advertisers, do some independent research and decide whether they actually care to own a product before buying it - not a demographic you want to advertise to. The dumber the "news", the dumber the news audience, the better the advertising potential.
I set up an account several years ago. Made a couple of dozen tweets and then realized that, not only did no one care about my tweets, but that there was no one that I could conceivably think of that I would care about that much to want to read everything they did. And for people that subscribe, or whatever it is, to more than one or two others must have no time in their day to do anything but read what is probably mostly drivel that is written by someone else who knows full well that no one really cares about what they writing.
It reminds me of this demotivator, it's for blogging but it still applies, http://www.despair.com/blogging.html
News agencies today are struggling under the pressure to make extraordinary profits by standards of how much news organizations made in the past.
News organizations were never supposed to be profit centers. Wealthy families who cared about their city or country started newspapers. Television and radio networks created news agencies in an effort to establish some level of prestige over their competitors. And because the FCC required them to provide programming in the public interest, news programs fulfilled that requirement.
But since the FCC as a regulatory body has had its power significantly lessened by decades of corporate and political pressure and since newspapers were bought by corporate conglomerates and expected to bring in a level of profit that they were never designed to, we've seen all the important news agencies corrupted and often abandoned.
The founding fathers of the US thought the dissemination of information, of "news" was so important that subsidizing it was one of their very first official acts as a new government. But today, the corporatization of news has diluted anything like journalistic purpose or ethics to the point where selling advertising takes a more important position than informing people.
Of course, the efforts on the Right to devalue expertise and objectivity has not helped.
You are welcome on my lawn.