DOI QR코드

DOI QR Code

Analysis and Implications of Twitter Data during the 2012 Election

  • Received : 2014.07.09
  • Accepted : 2014.08.21
  • Published : 2014.12.30

Abstract

Twitter is a microblogging service that allows users to post short messages on a variety of topics in real-time. In this work, we analyze Twitter messages posted during the 2012 elections and find those implications. This study uses Twitter messages related to the 2012 South Korean presidential campaign. The three main candidates are represented by the abbreviations A, M, and P. According to the statistical analysis, the number of tweets and re-tweets for candidate P was relatively stable over the entire campaign period. Candidate P had the highest percentage of terms related to elections pledges, and candidates A and M were judged to be a little bit poorer with respect to campaign promises. The positive terms ratio for candidate P was higher than those for the other two candidates. The negative terms ratio in the Twitter messages of P was considerably smaller than those of candidates A and M. After considering all these results, it is suggested cautiously that Twitter messages posted during an election campaign could be correlated with the outcome of the election.

Keywords

References

  1. D. Gayo-Avello, P. Metaxax and E. Mustafaraj, "Limits of Electoral Predictions Using Twitter," in Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2011.
  2. D. Gayo-Avello, "Don't turn social media into another 'Literary Digest' poll," Communications of theACM, Vol. 54, no. 10, pp. 121-128, 2011.
  3. A. Mislove, S. Lehmann, Y. Y. Ahn, J. P. Onnela, and J. N. Rosenquist, "Understanding the demographics of Twitter users," in Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media(ICWSM), Barcelona, Spain, pp. 554-557, 2011.
  4. A. L. Hughes and L. Palen, "Twitter adoption and use in mass convergence and emergency events,"International Journal of Emergency Management, Vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 248-260, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJEM.2009.031564
  5. E. Mustafaraj and P. T. Metaxas, "From obscurity to prominence in minutes: political speech and real-time search," in Proceedings of the WebSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, Raleigh, NC, pp.1-7, 2010.
  6. A. Livne, M. P. Simmons, E. Adar, and L. A. Adamic, "The party is over here: structure and content in the 2010 Election," in Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media(ICWSM), Barcelona, Spain, pp. 201-208, 2011.
  7. A. Tumasjan, T. O. Sprenger, P. G. Sandner, and I. M. Welpe, "Predicting elections with Twitter: what 140 characters reveal about political sentiment," in Proceedings of the International AAAI Conferenceon Weblogs and Social Media(ICWSM), Washington, DC, pp. 178-185. 2010.
  8. B. O'Connor, R. Balasubramanyan, B. R. Routledge, and N. A. Smith, "From tweets to polls: linking text sentiment to public opinion time series," in Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media(ICWSM), Washington, DC, pp.122-129, 2010.
  9. P. T. Metaxas, E. Mustafaraj, and D. Gayo-Avello, "How (not) to predict elections," in Proceedings of the IEEE 3rd International Conference on Social Computing(SocialCom), Boston, MA, pp.165-171,2011.
  10. A. Bermingham and A. F. Smeaton, "On using Twitter to monitor political sentiment and predict election results," in Proceedings of the Workshop on Sentiment Analysis where AI meets Psychology(SAAIP), ChiangMai, Thailand, pp. 2-10, 2011.
  11. S. Asur and B. A. Huberman, "Predicting the future with social media," in Proceedings of IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT), Toronto, Canada, pp. 492-499, 2010.
  12. National Election Commission in South Korea, The voters' survey for 18th Presidential Election [Internet], Available: http://info.nec.go.kr/.