Twitter Gets Political with a Political Index - gilmorepeentwer

The "Chirrup Political Index" helps the multitude figure out just how the quietus of the Twitter humans feels about the ii statesmanlike candidates. Instead of relying on intuitions of political experts or waiting for the polling phone calls to make up made, Twitter's new joyride powered away Topsy volition keep you hip to nigh the general consensus on the candidates.

The tool sorts through with 400 trillion tweets from 140 million active users day-after-day and assigns a sentiment score to each tweet, either positive or negative. The scale runs on a 0-100 scale and is individual to each candidate, substance they are non head-to-head. Both candidates can have a score over 50 and they can both lose or gain points on the same day.

Non only if can the algorithm tell if a pinch is positive OR negative, it can find out the severity of the sentiment. It is non without error, of course. For instance, it can't take into consideration any classify of sarcasm. That being aforesaid, the algorithm motionless agrees with the sentiment of a randomly elite human 90 percent of the metre terminated 300,000 tweets according to Topsy's of import man of science Rishab Ghosh. That's not a disobedient record.

Twitter bequeath release the results daily along the Political Index number land site. It already has a poll from May 1, 2012 through July 30, 2012 with a sweet line graph that shows some drastic changes. You can eventide track some of the changes with events, for instance: May 10, 2012 was Obama's highest score of 74. That was the same day he attended a fundraising dinner at George II Clooney's house. Chances are thither was much of natter about him that day.

It's great that a tool like this has come around to fill in for the traditional methods of opinion polling. By simply searching out generic tweets, there are no restrictions connected what a individual might suppose. They are non confined to simple fateful and white answers of a phone pate, and we get a lot more of a pass over try with the millions of Chirrup users. Piece this may non comprise a direct poll, it sure as shooting helps to see how the Twitterverse feels about the candidates, and IT testament be even more crucial equally the November date draws nearby. That is, if these kids leave actually go out and vote!

[BuzzFeed]