Watch Mitt Romney's Facebook Likes Decrease in Real Time

Same on the local level in Texas (where I lived for some years), with partisans actually seeming happier about the TX Democrats' misfortunes than the TX GOP's success.

Coming from a country where self-deprecating humor is considered the mean, I must say that this didn't even remotely think "What losers!" about republicans.

Come to think of it, my first thought was "silly Americans", a thought aimed at the people that "liked" someone they thought might end up in office, and then un-liked him as soon as that didn't happen. I guess there's two kinds of shallow at work there: - Mine, for thinking "silly Americans" when it's only a portion of them - Theirs, for liking someone because he's popular

In the end, the dislikes say more about how people use Facebook (or maybe, social media in general) than about Republicans.

Finally, isn't it amazing what we can learn about human behavior with just a simple graph?

What I have seen, though, is a lot of pathetic doom-and-gloom and sky-is-falling idiocy from the right wing -- people crying about how "my country is done for" and other such stupidity.

However, this page really is not compelling to me, because these graphs are such a prime example of a blatant misuse of vertical scale. The y axis currently ranges from 12,046,000 to 12,050,000, which makes the decrease look like a sharp 45° falloff, when in fact it's fallen by 0.02% during the time shown. The numbers are the same to within four significant digits. So what is this supposed to be telling me?

Subsequent to this was the Presidential Election of 2000. Widely viewed by the Left as illegally stolen by the monied interests of the GOP putting the importance of victory over the legitimacy of their power. This President presided over the worst decade in American history since the 1930's, and he and his party (and their supporters) are widely blamed by the Left for the clusterfuck the world found itself in circa 2008.

Less than four years later, the GOP seems to have suffered from amnesia. They didn't seem to grasp that most of the problems they railed against Obama for not having fixed in four years were the result of their own bright ideas being put into practice over the preceding eight.

Certainly, Obama screwed up by trying to work with the GOP when he had the advantage in Congress. After two years of GOP obstruction, the midterms handed them enough of Congress to see that absolutely nothing of importance to the President (even if those things also important to everyone else) ever saw the light of day.

Whether or not these views are accurate, I think this is the mindset from which many on the Left are lashing out at the Right.

Potentially, but I have two concerns about this. First, I'm not familiar with the facebook api, but does it does it provide a way to determine an account's like count retrospectively? Or does this kind of analysis rely on scraping pages over the time-period of the analysis? Put it another way, could a historian in twenty years time reproduce this data, or does it have to be collected now because no historically useful record is kept? I suspect that online sources actually leave much less historically useful data than, say, newspapers on microfiche, despite online data being much easier to analyse.

And secondly, what happens to the data if/when facebook or twitter or google disappear or merge or change massively. As commercial entities, none of them are in the historical data business for anything other than short-term commercial gain. They have no obligation to the more distant future.

I wonder what historians think about everything going digital?

Yes.

Losing a presidential campaign is going to prime the media and individuals to report about the team's failings and those of the candidate. Many criticisms are going to be valid. Likewise, Obama's campaigners will have successes that will be reported on. So I think we'd be seeing the opposite articles if the outcome of the election was different.

For this reason, its a very interesting election to study and analyze from a technology perspective. E.g. has the internet really succeeded in disseminating data and viewpoints effectively, or has it made our "bubble walls" more rigid. What is the role of fact checking and factual reporting when it comes to the media, has technology made getting to the truth easier or harder?

Very interesting for the hackers on this site...

Also, in discussing this election, its unavoidable that Romney is painted in a bad light. He lost after a spirited campaign that was alas never as close as he and his team portrayed it to be.

1. You like it.

2. You understand that “likes” are used by advertisers, distributors, etc., to track brand popularity, so you clicked like to support something that you might not personally like. (I’ve done this with, for example, friends’ projects that are of no actual interest to me.)

3. You want to see its updates. (I have a leftist friend who likes to keep an eye on the right wing and “liked” Romney on Facebook for exactly this reason, even though it’s essentially a “dislike”.)

There are probably a couple others. Peer pressure, for example? Besides which, I think it’s fair to withdraw a like from something if you believe it’s outlived its usefulness. If I’d “liked” a ballot measure that failed to pass, for example, I don’t think it would be in any way dishonorable to stop following it now, even if I still completely supported its aims.

It's in the source code using the google Chart api [https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/index]

    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.min.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">

      // Load the Visualization API and the piechart package.
      google.load('visualization', '1.0', {'packages':['corechart']});

      // Set a callback to run when the Google Visualization API is loaded.
      google.setOnLoadCallback(init);

      // Callback that creates and populates a data table,
      // instantiates the pie chart, passes in the data and
      // draws it.
      function drawRealtime() {

        var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable(headings.concat(likes));

        var options = {
          title: 'Realtime Like Count For Mitt Romney',
          hAxis : {textColor: '#ffffff'},
          colors: ['red','#004411'],
          legend: {position: 'none'}
        };

        var chart = new google.visualization.LineChart(document.getElementById('realtime'));
        chart.draw(data, options);
      }

      function drawHistoric() {

        var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable(headings.concat([['1:59pm',12049076],['2:16pm',12048948],['2:30pm',12048820],['2:45pm',12048681],['3:00pm',12048559],['3:15pm',12048421],['3:30pm',12048297],['3:45pm',12048182],['4:00pm',12048077],['4:15pm',12047946],['4:30pm',12047807],['4:45pm',12047660],['5:00pm',12047509],['5:15pm',12047380],['5:30pm',12047247],['5:45pm',12047105],['6:00pm',12046942]]));

        var options = {
          title: 'Recent Like Count For Mitt Romney',
          legend: {position: 'none'}
        };

        var chart = new google.visualization.LineChart(document.getElementById('historic'));
        chart.draw(data, options);
      }

      var headings = [['Time','Likes']];
      var likes = [];

      console.log(headings.concat(likes));

      window.setInterval(fadeAway,1000);

      function init() {
      	drawHistoric();
      	window.setInterval(fetchLikes,1000);
      }

      var start = 0;

      function fetchLikes() {
      	$.getJSON('https://graph.facebook.com/mittromney?fields=likes',function(data){
			console.log(data.likes);
			if(likes.length==0) { data.likes+=10; start=data.likes; } else {
				$("#count").text("-"+(start-data.likes));
			}
			likes.push([new Date().getTime(),data.likes]);
			drawRealtime();
		});
      }

      function fadeAway() {
      	var opa = $("#romney").css('opacity');
      	$("#romney").css('opacity',(opa==0 ? 0 : opa-0.02));
      }

    </script>

After the graph API has been loaded.

Careful, there: http://xkcd.com/605/

Also, Obama's second term doesn't start until January 20, Romney will have been long forgotten by then.

The decay looks linear at a glance, but I'd expect it to be exponential on a larger time scale. Time will tell :)

Edit: wanna bet?

http://www.moinnadeem.com/romneylikes