
Twitter May Have Predicted the Election - jonbaer
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603010/twitter-may-have-predicted-the-election/
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rm999
Right now 100% of the comments in here are about "predicting" the election,
when the word "predict" isn't even used in the article. Probably an over-eager
editor who changed the title.

The article itself is about a very interesting network analysis of
establishment vs non-establishment behavior. I'd like to see more discussion
about the content of the article.

edit: downvoted within 1 minute for trying to spur interesting discussion past
the crappy headline :(

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thecity2
___“Our analysis was showing something, but our beliefs were different,” says
Vishal Mishra, CEO of Right Relevance, which sells a research platform focused
on influence. “We thought, how is Trump going to win? But our analysis kept
showing us.”_ __

He doesn 't say "predict". But it is very clearly implied.

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Jweb_Guru
Any global predictor that claims to have accurately determined Trump's victory
should keep in mind that he lost the popular vote. Only a state-based
predictor can be plausibly said to have been able to make such a prediction.

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th0raway
I've seen one of those predictors. It looked at an honest signal, captured in
a way that would be fairly representative of the population at large. Since
the data had some location information attached, you could attach every point
of signal to a congressional district. The model was simple, comparing the
signal per district, and then building an electoral college map. It didn't
nail every state, but it wasn't off by much, and gave Trump a slightly smaller
victory than he actually had.

I won't mention the signal because I want to keep my job. However I'd be
surprised if there weren't at least a dozen companies that have access to some
honest signal with such a good sample of the population at large as to be
better at predicting the election than any pollster.

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lfam
It's interesting to think about where to find this information.

Big ISPs have access to these "honest" signals on a large scale.

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luluki
This makes sense to me. I saw similar things in newspaper comments sections. I
have a weird habit of always scrolling to comments sections of news articles.
It gives me an interesting snapshot of a huge range of opinions. On political
articles, I consistently saw so many comments from Trump supporters, with some
consistent threads of opinions (as well as more fringe or extreme ideas) that
just weren't being represented strongly enough in the general media. I also of
course saw comments from Hillary supporters and Trump haters. Their arguments
and thoughts WERE already being represented strongly in the general media -
there was not much new that I learned there. Something that Obama hasn't
addressed is just how biased our mainstream newspapers and magazines were in
the run-up to the election. As someone living in a highly liberal area (and
who is not aligned with Trump's politics - before I get criticized to
infinity) I felt I gained a lot of understanding for why people were
supporting Trump, not from the dozens of mainstream newspaper articles I read
each day, but from comments sections. I view that as a media fail. I was the
only person of my peer group who was not shocked about Trump's win. I'd also
add - the media strategy didn't work. Marginalizing people's voices and points
of view - often people who felt marginalized in other ways (economic etc),
strengthened their resolve to vote for the person who DID hear them (which was
Trump.)

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thecity2
Where's the "predictive" part? Just visualizing twitter networks isn't
actually a prediction.

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rhizome
Sounds like a "prediction" just like the results you get from training your
stock picker on historical data.

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pyromine
At least you can break your data in to training and testing sets for stock
picking, this is just hey guys we found a correlation. 20/20 hindsight is not
a prediction.

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thecity2
Exactly. Furthermore, is this company claiming that they can predict electoral
college distribution? Because we all well know that Hillary actually won the
popular vote. So in fact the _popular_ sentiment was actually on her side.

Any analysis claiming that they could predict Trump's victory without even
addressing the disparity between popular vote and electoral college is a fail
even before it begins.

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AznHisoka
actually Google Trends predicted it:

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=vote%20for%20hillary...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=vote%20for%20hillary,vote%20for%20trump)

it predicted obama as well in 2012

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=vote%20for%20romney,...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=vote%20for%20romney,vote%20for%20obama)

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artursapek
Interesting how Hillary is the only one who was referred to by first name.
"Vote for Clinton" didn't register as much as "Vote for Hillary"

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EdiX
My impression is that this was a choice of her campaign (differentiate from
Bill Clinton? make her seem friendlier?).

Jeb Bush and Bernard Sanders also had campaigns centered around their first
names.

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somebodynew
I find it odd that you refer to "Bernard" when he's almost universally
referred to as Bernie, but simultaneously call John Bush "Jeb". I'm missing
whatever the intended meaning of the way you wrote these names was.

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EdiX
I did not know that Jeb wasn't his real name, that's all there is to it.

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AznHisoka
holy cow. mind blown. did not know that wasnt his real name either.

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anigbrowl
How much computing power, work and money is it to produce visualizations like
this? I'm handy with cytoscape and DAG concepts but I don't know where to get
real time datasets like this, or how to automatically construct them for other
forums (eg say I wanted to study the social networks on Reddit or HN). Ideally
I'd like to be able to work with something like this interactively although
real-time operation isn't too important.

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gumby
One thing that jumped out at me from this brief article was that the use of
the term "media influencers" \-- they certainly weren't influencers in the
conventional sense of being gatekeepers.

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artursapek
Hindsight is 20/20

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the_mitsuhiko
How do these people predict the electorial college?

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thecity2
They don't. It's a complete PR sham.

