Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Buzz As an Election Predictor
Capt.Albatross writes "A study presented at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting suggests that simply comparing the frequency with which the candidates' names are mentioned in tweets can predict the result of elections almost as well as conventional polls, even without considering the sentiment (for or against the named candidate) of the messages. Furthermore, the correlation seems strongest in close elections. Additional commentary can be found at the Wall Street Journal and from Indiana University."
Don't hold any conferences, just get some bots to tweet the candidate's name.
Election win guaranteed.
Now if you could prove that tweeting about a candidate indicates that the person will actually vote in the upcoming election I'd be more impressed.
Google "buy twitter followers" and you will see a lot of companies dealing with this. Most of the time when you get random followers who just tweet the same format of things, its because they are bots.
Whichever candidate can afford hire the most companies to have bots repost what they are tweeting have the highest chance of winning. It all comes down to who has the most money for advertising, same as always.
Yes, perhaps a good predictor now, but only up to the moment when results of these polls are widely publicized... and some company offers to manipulate the trending words for a price?
That is only useful as long as no one bothered to notice this point consciously?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Mind you, this is cheap way of astro-turfing. But beyond the most superficial analysis, astro-turfing fails quickly. especially where reputation is considered. Create a couple of thousand of twitter bots ? Easy. Getting real people to follow them ? Hard. . .
My wife worked for an online "Marketing Sentiment" company, and she came up with the idea of trying to predict the American Idol winners using a very similar technique about 4-5 years ago (I forget exactly).
She found that it showed increased "excitement" in general terms, and generally there was a correlation with increased voting on American Idol, but it did not accurately predict the specific winners each week.
It sometimes seemed to work, though, so she (and others) messed with the algorithm quite a bit and tried to make it work. I.e. wasted a lot of time on it. Maybe someone with a more scientific approach would have succeeded, but the few times she had me look at the raw data (even with sentiment included) suggested to me a non-obvious relationship, and maybe not a predictive one.
Erich Boleyn
How's that Twitter thing working out for Anthony Weiner?
...we can vote in elections via Twitter.
following events on Twitter is a blast. I did not watch the presidential debates, I just followed the twitter hash-tag. It is like watching a movie audience where you can see the film or even hear it, you just have to judge what is happening by the audience's reaction. It is much more revealing than you would imagine. For example, you can see who is going to win the debate 15 minutes into the debate. The dynamic is established that quickly. And there are surprises. For example, when "binders full of women" suddenly started showing up on my feed I thought, "Romney could not possibly have said anything so bird brained." but he did. Twitter is my all time favorite way to follow public events.
successful twitter campaigns will increase voter turnout in the voting polls (for both parties). the voting booths and locations will not be equipped well enough to handle the normal volume of voter turnout because most of the sheeple are used to staying home rather than actually taking the time to vote. they'll show up and thousands of democrats will find that they should have registered to vote but didn't and so now they cant, or else they will have registered but some republican somewhere in the chain of communication will have conveniently forgotten to process their paperwork. then there will be angry "mobs" all fuelled by twitter, so of course now we'll have to censor it, and so on and so forth.....
The pretext makes for good media fodder, so it's hard to judge the plausibility of the results without looking at the actual study. Couldn't find it in the Washington Post article or through a quick search. A few questions that come to mind..
- How many elections were studied? If it's a small number, then are the models overtrained? It's easy to come up with a model that connects two data sets if the data sets are known !
- Are "negative" tweets distinguished from positive ones in some way? If people dislike a candidate then they are probably as likely to post on them. e.g. try running this model on Donald Trump when he was talking about getting into the 2012 race. If you could distinguish "votes" and "antivotes" reasonably well then the idea should become more defensible.
Just great... Cue tens of thousands of paid campaign staff trying to boost their candidate's stats.
hell, Obama bought followers.
Twitter data is shit.
http://votecompass.com/images/au-2013/auspol-twitterverse.jpg
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
In the 2008 election, there was an enormous interest in Ron Paul. His google searches were higher than any other Republican nominee for most of 2007 and 2008. His Twitter interest was huge.. http://www.nethosting.com/buzz/blog/ron-paul-wins-gop-nomination-if-twitter-votes-counted/
But, things are not transparent like that in the US. The mainstream media controlled the 'buzz' around Ron Paul and continued to act like he had little chance. The google trends and Twitter followers were ignored. The Internet buzz was discounted.
Maybe this article will be accurate in the future as the Internet takes over (and more so the Internet Generation takes over).. But if you tried to predict the last election based on Twitter, you would either be thinking there was massive fraud or there somehow was a huge amount of the US population that never heard of the Internet.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
It seems that now that this has been observed, outcomes are bound to change.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
that a large enough population of people who vote will actually say who they vote for given the chance and that result reflects reality.
Not a single graph on any of those links...
Despite the best efforts of those that own Slashdot to muddy the waters with the reports they promote, the story behind NSA spying is easy to understand. Spend a little time researching, and you'll find endless stories of ever improving predictions based on general data gathered from millions of users of the Internet. 'Twitter monitoring' is just the latest in a series of intelligence metrics that attempt to correlate user activity with particular opinions/positions held by the users in general.
NSA full surveillance operations have only ONE significant goal- namely to read the current mindset of the sheeple. Sure, particular enquirers may only care about sub-groups within the general population, but the same principle is obviously involved. The mainstream media, owned and controlled exclusively by those that define themselves as the 'elite', flood the world of the sheeple with propaganda messages (the owners of Slashdot obviously do the same here with their carefully chosen 'promotions'). The NSA then provides real time feedback as to the current levels of success for each propaganda program.
ALL massive intelligence operations witnessed across Human history (and this began even before writing was widespread) had this primary goal. The mob are the danger and the power source of any group that seek to rule over them.
This story on Slashdot is carefully crafted propaganda to make you think that you have choice in a national election. That Jack Johnson (with his 2 cent tax that "goes too far") is a different option to John Jackson (with his 2 cent tax that "doesn't go far enough"). Are you REALLY as thick as the owners of Slashdot assume? They don't care whether you vote for Clinton II or Bush III. They DO care if you don't vote, since not voting is a vote against their system, and if the participation in national elections falls too low, they cannot avoid having to change the system in a way that would be detrimental to their aims.
The NSA spying is not concerned with politics at the top- that is now fully controlled. It does have a concern about grass roots activism, and seeks to identify potential leaders/movements before they have public awareness, for co-opting or extermination.
So-called 'targeted advertising' flows from algorithms and methods Google crafts to allow the NSA to mine the Internet data it gathers. The ad stuff is just a useful commercial by-product. The real project seeks to identify and assign current thought positions to every individual that uses the Internet. Just like a polling company will phone an individual with a list of questions, but is NOT interested in that particular individual as an individual, but a representative member of a group. Every polling company will tell you that the more individuals you can track, and the more accurately/honestly they answer the questions, the better their predictions for the behaviour of the group.
God bless you, Washington Post.
They actually went to the trouble of including a damn chart, which shows just how weak the correlation actually is.
"strong correlation" " usually received a majority of the votes". Neither linked article mentions exact percentages for how accurate the data was overall.
captcha: unproven
Umm, no offense to our friends at Gallup and such, but shouldn't we set the bar a little higher?
I think someone told me that after the age of 30 people lose the ability to hear the buzzing. Having recently reached that age myself, I miss it slightly, though I can still hear it when the twits get close enough. Or maybe it was mosquitoes, I don't know, something annoying and useless.
...because the moment something like this is identified, it will be gamed.
-Styopa
Ok, here's the thing. If Twitter use/mentions currently are a good predictor of election results, then that's cool. However, when you make it known, you invite a bunch of intentional skewers to the mix thus destroying the instrument.
You should read this: http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.6441
But less stronger results seems to be possible: http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.6630
in an inverted fashion from how Nate Silver surfaced way back in 08 that under-representing cell-phone-only voters in polls under- represented the young, it'd seem that using twitter as a representative sampling will under-represent the old - e.g. those who vote more than the young do? http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/obamas-lead-looks-stronger-in-polls-that-include-cellphones/?_r=0
Need any more proof your elections are rigged ?
End of Line.
So, does that mean Anthony Weiner will win the election???