Authors
Gayo-Avello, Daniel
...
External links
http://arxiv.org/...
Press coverage
- asturias24 (December 27, 2015): Twitter no es la bola de cristal de las elecciones
- El País (December 20, 2015): Un tuit..., ¿un voto?
- Techcrunch (August 2, 2012): Chick-Fil-A Is Actually Popular: How Social Media Distorts Your View of The World.
- Techcrunch (May 11, 2012): The Importance of Social Media In Elections: Mostly Hot Air.
- Paseeur de Sciences, a blog by Le Monde (May 7, 2012): Pouvait-on prédire l’issue de la présidentielle avec Twitter? (in French).
- The Wall Street Journal (May 4, 2012): Why Twitter Cannot Predict Election Results
- ACM TechNews (May 4, 2012): Press clipping of the ACM.
- La Stampa (May 3, 2012): Twitter non basta per predire le elezioni (in Italian).
- Techpresident (May 2, 2012): No credible proof that Twitter can predict elections, researcher finds.
- Physics arXiv blog of MIT's Technology Review (May 2, 2012): Twitter cannot predict elections either.
Predicting X from Twitter is a popular fad within the Twitter research subculture. It seems both appealing and relatively easy. Among such kind of studies, electoral prediction is maybe the most attractive, and at this moment there is a growing body of literature on such a topic. This is not only an interesting research problem but, above all, it is extremely difficult. However, most of the authors seem to be more interested in claiming positive results than in providing sound and reproducible methods. It is also especially worrisome that many recent papers seem to only acknowledge those studies supporting the idea of Twitter predicting elections, instead of conducting a balanced literature review showing both sides of the matter. After reading many of such papers I have decided to write such a survey myself. Hence, in this paper, every study relevant to the matter of electoral prediction using social media is commented. From this review it can be concluded that the predictive power of Twitter regarding elections has been greatly exaggerated, and that hard research problems still lie ahead.