Can Tweets Predict Election Results? Insights from Twitter Analytics

Singh, Prabhsimran; Kumar, K. Sampath; Kahlon, Karanjeet Singh; Sawhney, Ravinder Singh

doi:10.1007/978-981-15-0108-1_26

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 31 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Social media has been successfully used in different fields such as behavior analysis [ 18 ], spam detection [ 19 ], electoral prediction [ 20 ], event detection [ 21 ], and economy [ 22 ]. Twitter as one of the most popular social media is widely used in micro and macroeconomics [ 23 – 25 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A cross-country analysis of macroeconomic responses to COVID-19 pandemic using Twitter sentiments

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the global economy. In this paper, we use the Phillips curve to compare and analyze the macroeconomics of three different countries with distinct income levels, namely, lower-middle (Nigeria), upper-middle (South Africa), and high (Canada) income. We aim to (1) find macroeconomic changes in the three countries during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic time, (2) compare the countries in terms of response to the COVID-19 economic crisis, and (3) compare their expected economic reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic in the near future. An advantage to our work is that we analyze macroeconomics on a monthly basis to capture the shocks and rapid changes caused by on and off rounds of lockdowns. We use the volume and social sentiments of the Twitter data to approximate the macroeconomic statistics. We apply four different machine learning algorithms to estimate the unemployment rate of South Africa and Nigeria on monthly basis. The results show that at the beginning of the pandemic the unemployment rate increased for all the three countries. However, Canada was able to control and reduce the unemployment rate during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, in line with the Phillips curve short-run, the inflation rate of Canada increased to a level that has never occurred in more than fifteen years. Nigeria and South Africa have not been able to control the unemployment rate and did not return to the pre-COVID-19 level. Yet, the inflation rate has increased in both countries. The inflation rate is still comparable to the pre-COVID-19 level in South Africa, but based on the Phillips curve short-run, it will increase further, if the unemployment rate decreases. Unfortunately, Nigeria is experiencing a horrible stagflation and a wild increase in both unemployment and inflation rates. This shows how vulnerable lower-middle-income countries could be to lockdowns and economic restrictions. In the near future, the main concern for all the countries is the high inflation rate. This work can potentially lead to more targeted and publicly acceptable policies based on social media content.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A cross-country analysis of macroeconomic responses to COVID-19 pandemic using Twitter sentiments

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We investigate multiple aspects of our data set, including network structure, polarities of various entities, and changes over time. Based on prior work suggesting that political entities in India and Pakistan may use social media to influence public opinion [2,3,40,54], we pay particular attention to the Twitter accounts of politicians as a method for uncovering political agendas. What are the overall polarities of our data set?…”

Section: Results and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Work on social media in India and Pakistan has focused on healthcare [1], natural disasters [47], selfpromotion (e.g. "brand marketing") primarily in relation to elections [2,3,40], or on election forecasting [36,54], though [65] does argue that the Pakistan Army uses social media to subvert democracy. While these works only focus on intracountry analysis, our work also examines tensions between India and Pakistan.…”

Section: Discussion and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Computational Analysis of Polarization on Indian and Pakistani Social Media

Tyagi¹,

Field²,

Lathwal³

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Between February 14, 2019 and March 4, 2019, a terrorist attack in Pulwama, Kashmir followed by retaliatory air strikes led to rising tensions between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed countries. In this work, we examine polarizing messaging on Twitter during these events, particularly focusing on the positions of Indian and Pakistani politicians. We use label propagation technique focused on hashtag cooccurences to find polarizing tweets and users. Our analysis reveals that politicians in the ruling political party in India (BJP) used polarized hashtags and called for escalation of conflict more so than politicians from other parties. Our work offers the first analysis of how escalating tensions between India and Pakistan manifest on Twitter and provides a framework for studying polarizing messages.

show abstract