Using Twitter Data To Approximate a Telephone Survey 68
cremeglace writes "A team led by a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University has used text-analysis software to detect tweets pertaining to various issues — such as whether President Barack Obama is doing a good job — and measure the frequency of positive or negative words ranging from 'awesome' to 'sucks.' The results were surprisingly similar to traditional surveys. For example, the ratio of Twitter posts expressing either positive or negative sentiments about President Obama produced a 'job approval rating' that closely tracked the big Gallup daily poll across 2009. The analysis also produced classic economic indicators like consumer confidence." By averaging several days' worth of tweets on presidential job approval, the researchers got results that correlated 79% with daily Gallup polling. Lead researcher Noah Smith said, "The results are noisy, as are the results of polls. Opinion pollsters have learned to compensate for these distortions, while we're still trying to identify and understand the noise in our data. Given that, I'm excited that we get any signal at all from social media that correlates with the polls." Here is CMU's press release.
In fiction... (Score:1)
Has anyone read Neal Stephenson's novel "Interface"? We're getting oh so close to it.
Big surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Film at 11.
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New tweet trend (Score:2)
No thank-you, please take me off your list... click
Demographics Anyone (Score:4, Insightful)
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I don't know what makes you say this, unless you're suggesting that the "people who have listed phone numbers" demographic is somehow not representative of the population as a whole, but telephone polls, if done properly, have the benefit of taking completely random, and thus fairly representative samples. (Again, if done correctly, i.e. large enough sample base, using proper selection algorithms, and evaluating the data sensibly.)
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not to mention economic indicators; most poor people don't have iPhones that they can tweet their every whim. Some people also don't twitter their political views. This whole thing screams selection bias.
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How is that different from phone polls?
Re:Demographics Anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, I have been considering even getting rid of the phone part of the cell phone and going data only, with Skype et al, is there even any point in paying the $30 or $40 a month for voice service?
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Hell, I have been considering even getting rid of the phone part of the cell phone and going data only, with Skype et al, is there even any point in paying the $30 or $40 a month for voice service?
I've thought about that two, but:
1. You've got to support non-tech people 'calling in', (OK, you've got SkypeIn', but
2. Whadda you do when you cut your leg off @ home, and either Skype or your local data link is down? POTS is very reliable..
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2. Whadda you do when you cut your leg off @ home, and either Skype or your local data link is down?
Agreed. This has happened to me five times already.
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You still have a phone number... Just get a PAYG SIM with a data plan, e.g. three have 3 GB/month for £5/month.
Not sure how it would work with paying for receiving calls in the US. It's a pretty crazy system if you ask me - what happens if someone calls you and you have no money on your phone?
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@#2 I'm not sure if you're aware of this or not but in the case of a 911 emergency cellular phones without a SIM or account are still capable of dialing out. (At least phone's I'm aware of can). Basically if you're stranded somewhere without a land-line and your account is frozen you can still dial 911 and it will go through. You can't dial other numbers however. Also a thing to note is that your phone will be more aggressive when fetching a signal. I've been able to get a 911 connection when my phone reported "no service". On top of that if you're not a preferred carrier (your carrier rents towers from a larger corporation) you sometimes will not be able to call out if the towers are 'occupied', but with 911 it forces your connectivity.
Your phone is not "more aggressive when fetching a signal"; it's just that 911 calls will be routed via ANY carrier's network.
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I think telephone polls only reach one demographic - people willing to take a survey over the phone, who don't instantly hang up on random callers, who don't have anything better to do, and who think other people give a crap what they think. This demographic does not represent me and I doubt it covers most of the US.
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The thing is, even if a telephone poll can never represent the people who don't like taking telephone polls, is not taking telephone polls really correlated with other opinions, e.g. Obama approval? If it isn't than the difference between poll haters and poll participants will be insignificant. If it is, I'm no statistician, but it might be possible to measure the difference and apply it to a telephone poll.
My guess is that they probably have been doing this already for quite awhile, if it's at all possible
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It does however cover "people who want to see what these telephone poles are about".
The lady asks me "Are you more likely to vote Democrat or Republican?".
I say, "Neither. I'm Libertarian."
"You must choose either Democrat or Republican."
"But I wouldn't vote for either of those yahoos. Your survey is flawed."
And so it went for half an hour. It was fun.
this is going to be obsolete almost immediately (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing it will take no more than a month for a combination of "conservative" and "progressive" blogs to rev up their teams of dittoheads to start flooding Twitter with politically themed messages, thus totally skewing the results. Same principle as Google-bombing, I guess. As someone who already views Twitter as almost entirely content-free, I can't say I'm particularly dismayed by this possibility. . . but anything that encourages the self-absorbed political zealots of this country can't possibly be good.
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Exactly my first though. Observing something will always change how that something behaves.
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So what I'm hearing is that we'll be voting via www.twitface-bloggerspewTMI.com any day now, is that about right?
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Astute observation, Doctor Heisenberg. [wikipedia.org]
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Astute observation, Doctor Heisenberg. [wikipedia.org]
Well done, Dr Obvious [urbandictionary.com].
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Well, sure, that is to be expected. Those two groups have much arguing to do about the purpose for which the size and power of the federal government should be expanded. Twitter could be an important growth area for them.
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I was thinking of a solution to the selection bias problem that I think would also help with this issue. The researchers could "profile" different users by looking at their history. New users (with little history) and frequent but consistent users (several negative messages about a candidate a day, effectively users that tweet very little useful information) can be discounted, while more dynamic users that change their opinions in interesting ways and correlate with polls can be counted more.
Pollsters often
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I'm guessing it will take no more than a month for a combination of "conservative" and "progressive" blogs to rev up their teams of dittoheads to start flooding Twitter with politically themed messages, thus totally skewing the results.
I love seeing them rally the troops to get everybody to go and vote on the unscientific polls that pop up all over the internet. I suppose one should never discount their importance. As an example, I'm sure that CNN's current quick vote poll, "Do you agree with President Obama's choice of Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court?" will determine the success or failure of the nomination process.
Re:this is going to be obsolete almost immediately (Score:5, Insightful)
anything that encourages the self-absorbed political zealots of this country can't possibly be good.
I dunno. Encouraging them to wast their time on Twitter instead of doing things that might have an actual impact on the world sounds like a pretty good idea to me! :)
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I'm guessing it will take no more than a month for a combination of "conservative" and "progressive" blogs to rev up their teams of dittoheads to start flooding Twitter with politically themed messages, thus totally skewing the results. Same principle as Google-bombing, I guess. As someone who already views Twitter as almost entirely content-free, I can't say I'm particularly dismayed by this possibility. . . but anything that encourages the self-absorbed political zealots of this country can't possibly be good.
It will be similar to how most polls are biased in how they present questions and the results are manipulated to prove points.
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Makes sense; conservatives usually stick to editing Wikipedia.
Brb making multiple twitter accounts (Score:3, Interesting)
Just like traditional pollsters, social media researchers will have to address how representative Twitter users are of the general population. And unlike telephone surveys, small groups of people can wildly skew the results of Internet data,
Yes I did STFA (Skim the fucking article).
It mentioned the two main problems I see with this, cheating the system and whether twitter really is a large enough sample and a random enough sample to be considered a viable alternative.
Twitter has a whole range of people who don't actually use the damned thing. As with any poll though, people are going to say that the minority polled is what everyone says.
"The American people want to do x! Our poll says 80% of the American people want it!" No. No it doesn't. It just means 80% of the people you polled want it.
I despise how easy it is to use statistics and polls to manipulate people.
Re:Brb making multiple twitter accounts (Score:4, Funny)
79% is not fantastic (Score:5, Informative)
I've collaborated on research using Twitter traffic as a predictor so I applaud their efforts, but a 79% correlation with telephone responses is not as high as it sounds. For example, the minimum acceptable correlation for interrater reliability is typically 80%.
Put simply, the Twitter data can only account for about two thirds of the variation in phone responses. That's useful but there's still a lot of unexplained variance -- we have a long way to go.
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Maybe I just don't understand inter-rater reliability, but where did you get 2/3 from? 79% is pretty much 4/5, not anywhere near 2/3.
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Inter-rater reliability is sometimes taken as the correlation between two raters' scores. Reliability is a different concept from variance explained, which is equal to the square of the correlation. Twitter can predict 0.79 * 0.79 = 62% of the variance in phone responses.
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I'm not sure what a "79% correlation" even means. The way to describe correlations is to provide estimated correlation coefficients. It appears that even the original article [cmu.edu] uses this bizarre percentage notation ("r = 63.5%"), which suggests that perhaps the authors don't understand correlation as well as they think they do. Sigh. This is what happens when computer scientists try statistics without any training...
Other applications (Score:1)
79% (Score:2)
That is NOT nearly correlated? That is BARELY correlated. And will not get you meaningful results. This will also stop being meaningful as soon as it is publicized people are paying attention to the content of the tweets.
Cripes.
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Are you making a claim that telephone surveys give meaningful results when the surveyors try to shoehorn respondents to accept answers that are on their multiple choice questionaire?
Now that the word is out it's useless. (Score:3, Interesting)
As soon as something like this comes to light it's only a short matter of time until turfers screw it up. Turfers are like spammers, as soon as there's a new medium they abuse it into uselessness.
from "awesome" to "sucks" (Score:1)
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So something like this [zgp.org]?
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Twitter Users =/= Average American (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who spends a lot of their time working to uncover endogeneities in statistical analysis, I feel that analyzing Tweets will never be a viable measure of general American opinions.
Remember when The Literary Digest predicted Alf Landon would crush FDR in the 1936 presidential election based on a poll of its subscribers? Okay, you don't *remember* that, but you've probably heard of it. Same problem here.
The readers of Literary Digest were not representative of the average American in 1936.
The users of Twitter are not representative of the average American in 2010.
Twitter polling is no better than straw polling, which is usually worse than nothing.
Both "McCain" and "Obama" mean Obama is good? (Score:3, Interesting)
Umm... from TFA:
Likewise, both the Twitter-derived sentiments and the traditional polls reflected declining approval of President Obama's job performance during 2009, with a 72 percent correlation between them.
Okay... not a great correlation, but let's continue....
But the researchers found that their sentiment analysis did not correlate as well with election polling during 2008. For instance, increased mentions of "Obama" tended to correlate with rises in Barack Obama's polling numbers, but increased mentions of "McCain" also correlated with rises in Obama's popularity.
WTF? Is all of this built on how many times "Obama" or "McCain" is uttered on Twitter? And, given the obvious skewed demographics on Twitter (i.e., younger people, which tended to poll way toward Obama), increased conversations about McCain probably were bad in general.
Well, how do they explain this? Ah, the next sentence....
Improved computational methods for understanding natural language, particularly the unusual lexicon of microblogs, will be necessary before Twitter feeds can be reliably mined to predict elections, the researchers concluded.
Ah yes, the "unusual lexicon of microblogs," which probably consisted of sentiments like "I luv Obama!" and "McCain too old - WTF?"
Perhaps if they bothered to measure more than "mentions" of a candidates name, the data might have some (albeit still vague) meaning...
If this is the best stuff from the study which they actually mention in a press release, how much crap results are they not reporting?
it doesent suck (Score:1)
I'm excited that we get any signal at all (Score:2)
"I'm excited that we get any signal at all from social media"
s/excited/amazed/
Twitter as a telephone survey ??? (Score:1)
Modern Technology Approximates Mediocrity (Score:1)
Wow! You mean modern technology has progressed to the point where it can approximate the results of totally inaccurate guesswork derived from people so sad that they'll actually stay on the line when phoned up by a total stranger?
Truly, technology amazes me. (Or humanity does. I can never quite keep that straight.)
Didn't they already do this? (Score:1)
From TFS (Score:2)
measure the frequency of positive or negative words ranging from 'awesome' to 'sucks.'
So what about "Obama doesn't suck!" or "McCain is as awesome as my grandmother who isn't awesome at all!"
Damn.
Slashdot must be slipping (Score:3, Funny)