Computing political preference among twitter followers

Through anecdotal evidence and a variety of methods, claims are constantly being made about the bias of media outlets. As many of those outlets create online personas, we seek to measure the political preferences of their audience, rather than of the outlet itself. In this paper, we present a method for computing political preferences of an organization’s Twitter followers using congressional liberal/conservative ADA scores as a seed. We apply this technique to characterize the political preferences of major news media Twitter audiences. We discuss how this technique can be extended or used to create personalized recommendations and insights for news seekers and social media analysts and marketers. Author Keywords Twitter, politics, liberal, conservative, news, journalism ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Jennifer Golbeck, Derek L. Hansen
• Keywords: CHI 2011, Human Computer Interaction, Information Interfaces, Political Preferences, Twitter