As election season heats up, so does debate on both sides of the isle. One day the tides are in President Obama's favor, the next their lifting up Mitt Romney. Today Twitter unveiled a new way of measuring public opinion on both candidates based on the content of millions of tweets sent daily.
The Twitter Political Index looks at the sentiment behind tweets about either President Obama or Mitt Romney and determines whether they're positive or negative. It then compares the ratio of positive to negative tweets about the candidate to the ratio of positive to negative tweets about all topics that day. So if Obama has an index number of 34, as he does today, that means that tweets about him on average are more positive than 34 percent of all tweets.
The Index provides an interesting look into the heart of Twitter's 140 million active users. Right now it seems that most users are less jazzed about both candidates than they are about pretty much anything else, which, sadly doesn't come as much of a surprise.
[via BuzzFeed]
