Twitter gave more accurate predictions in more competitive races, the lead researcher says. How tweets turn into votes

Researchers at Indiana University say they have found that more tweets gets you more votes on Election Day.

A study presented Monday at the American Sociological Association conference found election results could be predicted by the percentage of tweets mentioning those candidates, whether or not they were positive.


By examining the percentage of votes for political candidates in the 2010 House races, researchers said they were able to correctly predict the winner in almost all of the races they studied.

The study looked at a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets from Aug. 1 to Nov. 1, 2010, and data from 406 competitive congressional elections. The more competitive the race, the more accurate their predictions lead researcher Fabio Rojas told NPR.

“It tends to do very well when the race is very competitive. For example, there was one in Utah where, you know, somebody was getting about 47 percent of the vote and the Twitter share was about 45 percent of the vote. So a lot of the cases are within the margin of error of a traditional poll,” Rojas said.

But don’t expect Twitter to replace a traditional poll any time soon, Rojas said.

“I think political polls are going to remain useful. They’ve very valuable in specific cases. So, for example, if I’m interviewing a voter and I’d like to know more about them, a poll is a very good place to do that because we can ask the question directly, while we don’t have as much information about people from social media unless they reveal it themselves through what they write.”

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Elections