2021/01/01 by Robyn A. Ferg, Ferg, Robyn A., Frederick G. Conrad +3
Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Social Media and Politics #Twitter #presidential approval #sentiment analysis #social media #surveys
paper · pdf · doi:10.12758/mda.2021.04
openalex publication_date 2021/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
There has been much interest in using social media to track public opinion. We introduce a higher level of scrutiny to these types of analyses, specifically looking at the relationship between presidential approval and “Trump” tweets and developing a framework to interpret its strength. We use placebo analyses, performing the same analysis but with tweets assumed to be unrelated to presidential approval, to assess the relationship and conclude that the relationship is less strong than it might otherwise seem. Secondly, we suggest following users longitudinally, which enables us to find evidence of a political signal around the 2016 presidential election. For the goal of supplementing traditional surveys with social media data, our results are encouraging, but cautionary.