Twitter is getting in on the social analysis game. The micro-blog will publish a daily measurement of Twitter sentiment surrounding the 2012 presidential election called the Twitter Political Index, the company announced Wednesday.
The Index works like this: Every day, it scans every tweet mentioning one of the candidates and weighs it against millions of tweets posted about other topics. It then gives each candidate a sentiment score relative to all tweets -- not just tweets about the other candidate.
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According to Twitter, nearly two million tweets every week mention one of the candidates. That frequency means there's plenty of data to sample. However, some politics experts immediately began debating the potential accuracy of the index:
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Coming from me, this might sound weird, but the new
#twindex just promulgates the false assumption that Twitter can predict the election.— Ethan Klapper (@ethanklapper) August 1, 2012
@buzzfeedben But who is on Twitter? Younger, tech savvy users. The folks who actually vote skew older. Not really the Twitter set.— Ethan Klapper (@ethanklapper) August 1, 2012
Twitter, though, claimed in a blog post that the index can give new insight into voters' opinions by complimenting, not replacing, traditional polls.
"Just as new technologies like radar and satellite joined the thermometer and barometer to give forecasters a more complete picture of the weather, so too can the Index join traditional methods like surveys and focus groups to tell a fuller story of political forecasts," reads a post from Adam Sharp, head of government, news and social innovation at Twitter. "It lends new insight into the feelings of the electorate, but is not intended to replace traditional polling -- rather, it reinforces it."
Sharp provided a graph that shows Obama's score on the index often running parallel to, and sometimes predicting, his approval rating in traditional polls. The company's also partnering with well-established scientific polling organizations, likely to add legitimacy and expertise to its analysis.
Additionally, Sharp argued that the conversation on Twitter often returns from moments of high intensity (the killing of Osama bin Laden, for example) to core issues, such as the economy, at a higher speed than formal questionnaires. That difference between the index and scientific polling, Sharp believes, could prove useful to election watchers.
The Twitter Political Index is the product of a partnership between Twitter, Topsy, USA Today, The Mellman Group and North Star Opinion Research.
You can view at election.twitter.com, which will be updated daily at 8:00 p.m. ET.
Can social sentiment data from Twitter serve as a compliment to scientific polls from organizations such as Gallup? Share your thoughts below.
This story originally published on Mashable here.