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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.
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
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.
Sure, news outlets are spambots with publicly traded stocks.
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.
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
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.