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?"

Why would news outlets CARE if it's manipulated?

[Chas]

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.

The Real Story Here

[CanHasDIY]

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.

Flawed methodology

[johnwbyrd]

Fox News's darling for collecting poll data about political events is Rasmussen Reports. In Rasmussen Reports's methodology [rasmussenreports.com], 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.

Accounting for Online Bias and Sarcasm?

[eldavojohn]

I feel like there are some overlooked issues here like my own inkling that there is a liberal bias to people who are online and "tweet" on a regular basis. I'd imagine a lot of people in "the heartland" that work in remote areas and vote predominantly conservative don't care about 140 character websites.

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?

Re:Why would news outlets CARE if it's manipulated

[Johann Lau]

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.

Hmm, maybe they could, I dunno, engage in actual journalism or something, instead of echoing press releases? That might help.

Two Candidates

[misfit815]

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.

Re:Why would news outlets CARE if it's manipulated

[Art Challenor]

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.

Re:Two Candidates

[Hatta]

Yes, there are two candidates with a realistic chance to win

But only one agenda.