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Unpredictabilityof elections with
social media
Social media users are not a representative unbiased sample of likely voters.
Social media data is easily manipulated by
spammers and propagandists.
(In Twitter nobody knows
you are a robot).
“It works” is not enough: we need to know how it works.
(Much) better (and subtle) sentiment
analysis methods are needed.
Limits of Electoral Predictions using Twitter
Daniel Gayo-Avello (@PFCdgayo) – Univ. of Oviedo (Spain)Panagiotis T. Metaxas (@takis_metaxas) – Wellesley College (USA)
Eni Mustafaraj (@enimust) – Wellesley College (USA)
7.6% is a far cry from 2-3% MAE.
Sentiment analysis is just slightly better
than random classifier (36.9%).
Sentiment analysis weakly correlates with user’s political preference.
Promising results?
NO!Political discourse in social media is becoming common practice. One interesting aspect of this
is the possibility of pulsing the public's opinion about the elections. Allegedly, predicting
electoral outcomes from social media data can be feasible a even simple. Positive results have
been reported, but without an analysis on what principle enables them. Our work puts to test
the purported predictive power of social media metrics against the 2010 US congressional
elections. We found no correlation between the analysis results and the electoral outcomes,
contradicting previous reports. We argue that one should not be accepting predictions about
events using social media data as a black box. Instead, scholarly research should be
accompanied by a model explaining the predictive power of social media, if there is one.
of adult users engaged in electoral campaigns
through OSNs in 2010.22%Social media data have been used to successfully “predict the present” in
a great variety of topics.
Motivation
Therefore…<flame>
Social media data might predict everything
but it is difficult.
Corollary: Social media data can predict everything
once the answer is known and data not fitting are ignored.
</flame>
YES WE CANWilliams & Gulati
(Politics and Technology Review, 2008)Carr (Fast Company, 2010)
Tumasjan et al. (ICWSM, 2010)
NO WE CANNOTGoldstein & Rainey (L.A. Times 2010)
Jungherr, Jürgens & Schoen (Social Science Computer Review, 2011)
Maybe. Who knows?O’Connor et al. (ICWSM, 2010)
Lui, Metaxas & Mustafaraj(e-Society Conference, 2011)Gayo-Avello (CACM, 2011)
Can social media data predict elections?
Can we replicate the results?17.1% (Twitter volume)
7.6% (Twitter sentiment) 2-3% (professional polls)
Winner predicted in only half of the races.
Mean Absolute Error(MAE)