Watch Twitter users say who they voted for in real time | Hacker News Reader

Watch Twitter users say who they voted for in real time

twithinks.mit.edu

63 pointsmajia38 comments

The categorization is somewhat...suspect. This is from the latest tweets "for Romney".

- hate Americans who are like 'I always vote republican so of course I voted for romney'

- I'm not afraid to say who I voted for. I voted for Obama cause lets face it, Romney's just a dickhead.

- Sweet satire. "Why I voted for Mitt Romney" http://www.salon.com/2012/11/06/why_i_voted_for_mitt_romney/....

That said, from polls we know that the overall vote is going to be very close to 50/50, so the lopsided totals are a sign of skew in Twitter users, not the country.

I saw one that said, "I would have voted for Obama if he had accepted my Farmville request", and it ticked up for Obama.

I just saw one talking about the website itself. Both sides ticked up one.

So yeah, it's not exactly accurate, but hey - it's fun to watch.

I agree but dont you thing that there is value to be extracted from the two phrases "voted for Obama" and "voted for Romney"?

No, because those phrases do not appear to be linked to who voted or how they voted in any statistical meaning way. All you can derive from this is that on election day people are talking about the election in high volume. Hardly a revolutionary insight.

Yep first Romney one I saw was "Just because I'm white...... DON'T assume I voted for Romney!"

What we used for counting is slightly different from what you see in the Twitter widgets (yeah, those tweets are from Twitter directly). In our backend, we have a pretty conservative filter that matches a bag of phrases, such as "voted for barrack obama", "voted for pres obama", etc. The accuracy is over 95%. Of course, political tweets are full of sarcasm and humor, and Twitter is full of demographic bias. This is just a fun project for us.

How many of the votes are from the 25,000+ people that retweeted Michelle Obama saying 'voted for President Obama'?

https://twitter.com/MichelleObama/status/265906946530496513

You'd probably clean up a whole lot by ignoring tweets containing "RT". That seems to be much of the stream.

We don't remove RT tweets, but instead, we only count each user once. If a user retweeted Michelle, s/he probably will vote for Obama. But if a user have a few tweets in favor of Obama, it's counted once only.

The accuracy is over 95%

Citation needed...

How can you draw this conclusion at this point in the process? I'm genuinely curious to your filtering scheme to be able to extract information out of such a noisy data stream.

This is not a scientific research, so I didn't compute std, t-stats, etc. But I did pull a few hundred tweets from our database and counted how many wrong ones we had. That's where the number comes from. The filtering scheme is very simple: classify only if we're confident. There are many tweets containing "voted", but we only took ones we have a strong confidence and throw away the rest. For a complete set of keywords used for filtering, please feel free to email.

To me the most interesting thing is that it slightly resembles my gold standard for polls: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/2012_...

That site, btw, seems to be out of the damned future with their predictions.

I saw one saying "I voted Romney because he is white."

My faith in humanity just lost a few more points here.

Watching these is kinda depressing, how is a vote supposed to mean something when so many meaningless people are using it?

Of course this is very much subject to selection bias.

My favorite one so far under the people who "voted for Obama" is:

I couldn't sleep at night had I voted for Obama or Romney. #IVotedGaryJohnson

I wonder if this is skewed at all based on whether more twitter users are Dem. or Repub already.

I would say that given Obama is leading in Utah according to this we can safely assume there is some skewing going on.

It seems safe to say that Obama voters are more tech savvy. After all, they are "progressive," which roughly means that they like new stuff.

Very interesting. Of course, the map is biased to those who use the internet (which is why it shows Obama winning every state), but I wonder if this could still be used for predictions by normalizing each state to a known percentage for the "safe" states.

Fortunately, we'll have the data to compare against actual state or county results, since most of these folks leave their location settings enabled, too.

While it won't predict this location, correlational data could be applied for future elections assuming the primary political leanings of the electorate don't change too much in 4 years.

looks like Romney voters don't use twitter ...

Twitter users vote blue 2 to 1. Not surprising, incorrect classification aside.

Here's one from Bluefin Labs: http://thecrowdwire.org/post/35128521367/our-live-social-med...

There seems to be some mistakes in identifying who voted for what...

"I'm not afraid to say who I voted for. I voted for Obama cause lets face it, Romney's just a dickhead"

Ha!In the 'I voted for Romney' section:

"Jack kelly @tweeterjak I'm not afraid to say who I voted for. I voted for Obama cause lets face it, Romney's just a dickhead."

Looks like they parse for "voted" and the last name mentioned in the tweet. Similar ones show up on both sides.

Seeing tons of these at the moment:

    RT @MichelleObama: RT if youve already voted for President Obama today! #VoteObama

Those seem valid though, no? The intent of the RT is to say "I voted for Obama"

Well they would be mostly actual votes, but it causes Obama voters on Twitter to be more likely to mention having voted than Romney voters. You'd probably get more accurate results if you eliminated all these.

Looks like Obama's going to take every state.

Do tweets like this scare the s--t out of anyone else?

I voted for Obama but if Romney win the election, i would still be happy, because God says He will elect the best...

Nah, he's right. I remember God mentioning that one day we were having a beer.

Why's that scary? That's a pretty positive, constructive attitude to have.

This isn't Reddit nor is it /r/atheism. Please keep your comments constructive.

No. For all you or I know this person is a better, happier, more intelligent person than you or I.

They did their civic duty and will accept the democratic will of the people regardless of the outcome.

I personally find it scary when people think that "Gods will" has anything to do with electing the leader of the most powerful country in the world for the next four years.

It starts to sound a lot like fundamentalism, and makes me wonder how different this is than parts of the world in constant violence due to "gods will".

I'm much more worried by the fact that voting is so widely considered "our civic duty" than by the fact that some people believe there is a God whose will affects the world.

Scarier to see voting for president being "did their civic duty".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com