More tweets, more votes

Truthy team members Karissa McKelvey and Johan Bollen collaborated with IU Department of Sociology members Joseph DiGrazia and Fabio Rojas on the paper More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior published in PLoS ONE. The paper aimed to see if the share of social media attention garnered by political candidates is significantly and reliably correlated with electoral performance. Their research suggests that indeed, holding other factors constant, candidates who received a larger share of attention on Twitter were more likely to win than their opponents.

Popular news outlets including Wall Street Journal, NPR and Washington Post picked up the story, many focusing in particular on potential ramifications the research will have on the current methods of political polling. More press links for this paper can be found at Karissa's website.