Twitter has recently
decided to take part in the 2012 presidential election with the launch of the
new tool called the “Twitter Political Index”. With this tool, people can track
the popularity of each candidate. Twitter has even created a separate website
to keep up with each candidate and how many ‘popularity votes’ they have based
on tweets. They are able to do this by analyzing the tweets that users post
about each candidate to tell whether that person is in favor of that candidate.
Twitter believes this concept will become very popular among their users. “Dick
Costolo, CEO of the social network, said he fully expected Twitter to play a
major role in this election.” (Gaudin)
The website that twitter created especially for their
political index can be visited at www.election.twitter.com.
Here, the two presidential candidates are shown with a tally number underneath
each of their names. Below, there is a line graph showing the recent popularity
of each candidate. Twitter is able to accurately measure the popularity of each
candidate by taking a daily toll of the tweets made about each candidate and
what the tweet is saying about them. When I first heard that twitter had
created this, I thought that it was not accurate because I assumed they were
only going by hash tags that users put on each candidate.
Twitter teamed up with a data analysis team at a company
called Topsy, an online traffic tracker, to help track down these political
tweets. Their job is to examine each tweet made about one of the candidates to
figure out if they are in favor for that specific candidate, if so; they put a
vote under that candidate’s name. This method may not be completely accurate in
getting the feel for popularity between the candidates considering the people
who do not have twitter accounts or do not choose to tweet about their
political feelings. It does, however, give a good feel for how the twitter
community feels about it and is very interesting for people to follow. "One
glance at the numbers, and it's easy to see why pundits are already calling
2012 'the Twitter election,' " wrote Adam Sharp, head of government, news
and social innovation at Twitter. (Gaudin)
A twitter blog read “Just as new technologies like radar
and satellite joined the thermometer and barometer to give forecasters a more
complete picture of the weather, so too can the Index join traditional methods
like surveys and focus groups to tell a fuller story of political forecasts. It
lends new insight into the feelings of the electorate, but is not intended to
replace traditional polling — rather, it reinforces it.” I believe this is a
very creative and neat concept that twitter has created. I think it will become
popular among twitter users to conveniently visit the website to see how the
candidates compare. It will be interesting to see if this political index
actually does play a role in the 2012 election.
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