Paul bests Mitt -- in Facebook chatter

POLITICO has joined forces with Facebook to offer readers an exclusive look at the conversation taking place on the social networking site about the Republican presidential candidates ahead of South Carolina's crucial primary on Jan. 21.


Facebook chatter about Ron Paul spiked after Monday night’s Fox News/Wall Street Journal presidential debate.

Paul — who is already very popular on social media sites because of his large and cyber-savvy followers — became the most mentioned GOP presidential candidate among Facebook users, shooting past Mitt Romney on debate night and staying well above the real-life front-runner by that measure for the following days.

Trying something new for presidential politics, Facebook surveyed its national users for “mentions” of the candidates in such things as their status updates, posts, shared links and other types of social messaging.

Paul — who placed third in Iowa and second behind Romney in New Hampshire — did get lots of airtime in the Jan. 16 debate. In fact, he was the subject of a GOP pile-on for his controversial foreign policy positions, that included suggesting capturing instead of killing Osama bin Laden.

Facebook uses an automated process to identify and analyze all Facebook posts and comments that are made by U.S. users and mention any of the presidential candidates. The analysis of sentiment is done using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a well-validated software tool used frequently in social psychological research to identify positive and negative emotion in text. No employees at Facebook or POLITICO read the posts and all measures are aggregated by candidate and by day. Facebook provided POLITICO with total post volumes and average sentiment levels for each candidate from Dec. 12 through Jan. 18.