Twitter Map Predicts 2012 Presidential Election: Will It Be Right?

During the presidential election, students at the Oxford Internet Institute followed discussions on twitter to predict which candidate will win the election. They predicted that Obama would win the election due to the fact that he was mentioned more frequently than Romney. This information was used to create a map that predicted the red and blue states in the United States. "There are a total of 132,771 tweets mentioning Obama and 120,637 mentioning Romney, giving Obama only 52.4% of the total (and Romney 47.6%)," researcher Mark Graham states on his blog. He acknowledges that these numbers are "remarkably similar to current opinion polls." Still, he doubts Twitter will accurately predict some states' political views but notes his data does reveal who the nation prefers discussing.