2016 Postmortem
Showing Original Post only (View all)STUDY: More Tweets More Votes! Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior! [View all]
For some people it is difficult to move away from the past even when progess and new technology demand it. Due to this phenomenon, people continue to place undue emphasis and trust in the old Political Polling Methodologies, despite pollsters themselves acknowledging that they have NOT kept up with new technology and its effects on their old Methodologies, which have been increasingly failing for a number of reasons.
It was inevitable therefore that studies would be forthcoming regarding the currently DISMISSED impact of online activity on various Social Media sites because not EVERYONE rejects NEW SCIENCE thankfully, when it comes along.
This is one study and I'm sure there will be more to determine what if any effect Social Media has on elections, among other things:
More Tweets More Votes! Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior!
Joseph DiGrazia,1? Karissa McKelvey,2 Johan Bollen,2 Fabio Rojas 1
1Department of Sociology
2School of Informatics and Computing
Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47408, USA
?To whom correspondence should be addressed; E-mail: [email protected].
...........
Here we show a statistically significant relationship between tweets and electoral outcomesthat persists after accounting for these potentially confounding variables. We compiled two large-scale datasets. First, we collected 2010 election outcomes and sociodemographic variables from all 435 U.S. House districts (18). Second, we retrieved a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets posted from August 1 and November 1, 2010. Then, we extracted 113,985 tweets that contained the name of the Republican or Democratic candidate for Congress.
This is evidence for the conventional wisdom that all publicity is good publicity.
Second, the models show that social media matters even when controlling for traditional television media, such as CNN, which many scholars have argued is important because it shapes political reality via agenda setting (27, 28), but does not seem to have a significant effect in our models.
Finally, this study adds to the mounting evidence that online social networks are not ephemeral, spam-infested
sources of information. Rather, social media may very well provide a valid indicator of the American electorate.
Acknowledgements We would like to thank Emily Winters and Matt Stephens for data collection as well as Clem Brooks, Elizabeth Pisares, and the Politics, Economy, and Culture Workshop at Indiana University for helpful discussions and contributions.
We gratefully acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation (grants SBE 0914939, CCF 1101743), the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the McDonnell Foundation
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Every time there is progress in human history, it is initially resisted by people who are more comfortable with the old ways. That is very natural because change can be scary.
Fortunately there are always, also, those who do not resist change but welcome it. And then there are those who want to know whether or not progress/change is good or bad for humanity.
Some things though simply cannot be denied, no matter how much resistance there may be.