Backed By Research, The Twitter Sentiment Index (TSI) Is A Method For People To Track The Public's "Feeling" Of A Presidential Candidate in near real-time.
Hey Everybody, My name is Chidubem Ezinne, call me CJ.
Over the past 10 years, Twitter has become a prominent method of communication in the United States. And more recently it has taken center stage for its prominent use by significant politicians and this has led to a myriad of political commentary to take presence on the platform.
After reading some older research on using twitter to analyze public sentiment; I decided to work on this as a side project and see what I could get built. What came out of this was The Twitter Sentiment Index.
✅How it works:
- Analyze the latest tweets on each candidate every 15 min
- Analyze each tweet's sentiment individually then save the overall average score
- To reduce the "noisiness" of the data I've provided a graph based on the Moving Average
✅Issues and future works:
- State Specific Analysis
- What is the best method of displaying this data?
- Implicit bias to the population with Twitter Accounts
@noahmittman Thanks for checking it out, Noah! Bots are tough to deal with, contextually the blend in well with normal tweets. As of right now, we've significantly limited bot input by focusing our twitter search to Text only tweets (No Retweets, or tweets with media). So far there are a lot of normal real political discussion than bots captured. Another attempt at slowing their effect is that by using a moving average, extreme sentiment scores can be repressed... now I did have an idea of utilizing a 20% Trimmed mean to cut back those all together, but I have to investigate that a little more.
@noahmittman@cjezinne1 Although the volume of data is most likely prohibitive, you could look for characteristics of the accounts themselves to try to flag bot accounts based on some characteristics common to them. However, the work load may not be worth the effort.
Wow, really cool! Would be so interesting if this could be correlated with FiveThiryEight.com data or other poll data to say something about how Twitter sentiment relates to future polling and/or results (if any). And: Would you be able to scrape profile data to understand more about the differences in Twitter sentiment among different demographics?
@casinobonustip Wow, thanks for the reference to Five Thirty Eight, I'll see what I can do to integrate and improve upon the data.
On the topic of predicting future polling, I have been a little wary of promoting this as a potential tool for that, however my referenced research have studied the matter with a similar solution like this for the last couple presidential elections and have had prominent results with older NLP Algorithms.
I have linked to all the research on my personal site CEzinne.com
Thanks for the comment, I truly appreciate it!
Cool idea! Given That primaries are local and create momentum in the election, have you considered localizing the data by primary calendar? You have Warren in first right now but she’s in life support in the early primaries. We might be interested in featuring this on votingsmarter.org. We are launching something here soon too.
@terryatvotingsmarter I would love and appreciate the feature. if you do decide to feature can you also link and include my name and website (Chidubem (CJ) Ezinne www.CEzinne.com)?
On the topic of Warren's lead. I am currently researching a method of weighing our data with current delegate numbers to see if any interesting trends appear.
This data isn't meant to predict the next president, but to answer an interesting question. As of right now (or the last day), how have the public been talking about me? Positively or Negatively?
Nonetheless, it is a work in progress and I always plan to iterate and add new features as needed.
@terryatvotingsmarter I also want to add, randomly enough #PresidentWarren has been trending in the United States today and it's interesting how this chart picked up this uptick in public sentiment.
The Twitter Sentiment Index
The Twitter Sentiment Index
The Twitter Sentiment Index
The Twitter Sentiment Index
The Twitter Sentiment Index