Twitter Launches Political Index 86
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?"
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Romney worked for a living, built and managed businesses, provided jobs
That sounds even more impressive than John Wayne, who is a Duke.
Anyway, -- so why is he giving up all that?!
Ah -- I see.
FYI Romney is a pussy.
Why would news outlets CARE if it's manipulated? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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What I wouldn't do for a "+1, Sad But True"
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I mean, this is an American Presidential elections...why would be give a fuck about what other countries think about who we should elect?
While many outside the US have an opinion on this, and we see it on /. quite often...why in the world should it be included in any poll for the US?
Why in the world would we want to let foreign interest
Re:Why would news outlets CARE if it's manipulated (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, maybe they could, I dunno, engage in actual journalism or something, instead of echoing press releases? That might help.
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engage in actual journalism or something, instead of echoing press releases
It's far worse than that. Almost all "news" is worthless, speculative, time-wasting trivia. Either that, or poorly-informed, badly thought out "opinion pieces". If you're bored on a weekend, try buying a "quality" newspaper, and cut out every article in it that you might honestly be able to say is important for you to know about or that contains reasoned argument supported by verifiable facts. Years of worthless "news" indoctrination
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I think that's probably true of Twitter themselves, too. This is an entertainment tool that succeeds if people pay attention to it, not really based on whether it predicts the election correctly (which nobody expects it to).
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I would even go so far as to say that the more skewed and outrageous the better from their standpoint. News, especially broadcast news has become so centered on ratings that the more wild, outlandish, or seemingly completely unbelievable the story the more likely they are to run it. And not only run but use it in all their commercials for the day, mention it prior to every commercial break during the actual broadcast, then finally air it as the very last thing so that when the viewers find out that is was c
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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 a
Twitter is only used by a certain sub-group! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Twitter is only used by a certain sub-group! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Twitter is only used by a certain sub-group! (Score:4, Informative)
Driving the conversation (Score:3)
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
Re:Driving the conversation (Score:4, Funny)
Sure, news outlets are spambots with publicly traded stocks.
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Probably by looking at the ratio of original tweets versus unique user retweets. I'd imagine the ratio to be far higher for a legitimate news outlet.
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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 ab
The Real Story Here (Score:5, Insightful)
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...the mad ramblings of a fringe margin of society.
Just wait; next they'll be judging public opinion off of Slashdot comments!
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Maybe we'll get more than two choices that way.
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Flawed methodology (Score:2, Insightful)
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 res
trending hashtag analysis is a research area (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Accounting for Online Bias and Sarcasm? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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!
Chances are, if someone is using a candidate's name to make a new word out of it, it's probably not going to be positive.
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And that is how Obamney is leading in the polls.
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Anybody who says that they can measure public sentiment with automated tools is selling snake oil. The semantic web is a million miles away from being here, and no amount of handwaving about the fact that they have a number negates the fact that the number is junk. Pure, total junk.
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Silly (Score:2)
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Please, please... We prefer to refer to them as 'low information voters' and treat them as our most valued customers, second only to the assorted interests who provide us with the money needed to buy their votes. No need to be rude.
On the internet... (Score:3)
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.
Political polling is nonsense (Score:2)
Bleep you, Frank! [youtube.com]
If Obama is polling at 48% to Romney's 47%, why would that have any effect on your voting decision? More to the point, why are campaigns obsessed with appearing like they're winning?
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Bandwagon.
Centralized Comm is Perilous (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Yes, a thousand times yes. "Freedom of the press is restricted to those owning a printing press."
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With just two parties that are more-or-less equal in resources and power, the manipulation should cancel out. And just like phone polling, there is a demographic bias on twitter, G+, FB, etc - but as long as they are known, then you get obtain fairly accurate numbers with the same kind of statistical voodoo they use to adjust phone poll numbers.
Given that the correlation between the two candidates swamps the differences between them (on their daily chart), I think the error margin is at least +/- 20% - so s
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What about the stuff both parties agree on, e.g. that discourse should to remain within the boundaries of repubmocracy? It's just "good cop, bad cop", with the republicans being the bad cop for democrat voters, and the democrats being the bad cop for republican voters. When the management teams switch, like those tag teams in WWF, everybody is relieved/angry for a while.
What should worry you is how e
"But I won the Twitter vote!" (Score:3)
Now whichever candidate loses the election can lament that he won the popular Twitter vote!
hm... (Score:2)
I wonder what the effect of driving positive numbers' Barack Obama down would be.
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Because until the US switches to Ranked Choice Voting only 2 parties can ever be competitive. and the 2 parties that are will have no incentive to change the system to let in 3rd parties.
(not to mention that the libertarians would probably shy away from RCV as being unconstitutional)
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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.
Sure Tweets can be manipulated but... (Score:2)
Anyone that's putting this much effort in will be aware of that and will be accounting for that in their scoring, topsy is driving this and they have a lot of spam experience.
Use betting odds (Score:4, Interesting)
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Not useful without additional data (Score:2)
The graph does not provide any reason why a candidate would be trending on twitter.
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The graph does not provide any reason why a candidate would be trending on twitter.
We have a project that is a bit more insightful about what is actually being classified as positive and negative:
http://politics.twittersentiment.org/streams/ [twittersentiment.org]
http://politics.twittersentiment.org/streams/stats.html [twittersentiment.org]
so where is Gary Johnson (L)? Jill Stein (G)? etc? (Score:1)
Its one thing for coporate media to relagate discourse to only two 'approved' voices, but Twitter in theory should have no such obligation and should offer a far greater choice. Alas, the owners of this centralized star network think otherwise.
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The corporate media does occasionally notice that Johnson and Stein are in the race. For instance, the New York Times [nytimes.com] actually gave some coverage to Jill Stein, and The Daily Show [thedailyshow.com] had a pretty interesting interview with Gary Johnson.
But that's the sad thing: their collective chance of getting serious attention is basically 0. I should also point out that the Greens and Libertarians, despite significant differences in ideology, regularly cooperate on trying to force their way onto ballots and into debates. I
Two Candidates (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Two Candidates (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, there are two candidates with a realistic chance to win
But only one agenda.
Progress in polling overdue? (Score:2)
Project at USC (Score:1)
http://politics.twittersentiment.org/streams/ [twittersentiment.org]
The system in the article doesn't show any of the data that they use to base the scores on, so it is effectively a black box. Also it lacks the entertainment value of seeing the sometimes funny twitter data. Also, ours is real time so it's interesting to watch during a debate.
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but we show a sample of the individual tweets that were classified
Here's the link to actual tweet data that is classified into positive/negative/neutral/unsure
http://politics.twittersentiment.org/streams/stats.html [twittersentiment.org]
Ad revenue (Score:2)
Why only two candidates? Or, why this late? (Score:1)
I actually went to see "the tool" and it looks like Twitter is giving us the same old two choices (non-choices, in my opinion, but that is evident from my .signature ;-) ).
It would be much more interesting if it were launched a bit earlier in the season, or, at least, include all candidates remaining, including third parties.
At least Google Trends can give us a bit more interesting picture, e.g., this one: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=mitt+romney,+barack+obama,+ron+paul,+gary+johnson&ctab=0&geo=u [google.com]
Bots? (Score:2)
" 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? "
Follow the money.
Nearly all polls lie. (Score:2)
Nearly every presidential poll I've seen lists the current ratio of popular vote. But all that matters is the popular vote in 8 or 10 states where the electoral college outcome is in doubt. Why Twitter expects anyone with intelligence (oops, my bad) to think either that the national popular vote matters or that twits who tweet in any way represent a statistical valid sample is beyond me.
Blah blah blah (Score:2)
Let's look at this new Twitter site, shall we? The only clickable links I can see are to follow Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. There is no explanation of what the numbers mean or how they're calculated, nothing. I'm not even sure what they were trying to achieve because the page has no information or context on it at all. This is garbage.