A Twitter map made by a team from Oxford University predicted the outcome of the US election. Dr Mark Graham and his team from the Oxford Internet Institute collected 30 million tweets referring to Obama and Romney between 1 October and 1 November. The map displayed a total of 132,771 tweets mentioning Obama and 120,637 referring to Romney.
Graham commented, “I doubted that they would accurately predict that Obama would win in Texas, or that Romney would win in Massachusetts. But the overall outcome was accurate. They also reveal that many internet users in California, Texas, and much of the country prefer talking about Obama to talking about Romney.”
He added, “The point of the work wasn’t to predict the election, but rather to understand the geography of online election-related information. It turned out that the number of references to Obama as opposed to Romney are surprisingly similar to their actual poll numbers.
