Tweet-Based Election Prediction

Abstract

Twitter is a microblogging service that has more than 500 million messages on a daily basis. Scholars has been utilizing Twitter to monitor people reactions in political activities, such as debates and campaigns. By doing so, some of them claim that a forecast or prediction to an election can be made. Using the data from 2014 Indonesia Presidential Election, we calculate predictions with many different parameters. Our analysis of the prediction results shows the importance of a proper data collection method, removing spam, incorporating sentiment detection to the tweets, and performing data normalization using demographic information. Although looks very promising, our results show that result prediction is not applicable to any election. Dividing the data into 33 provinces, the data suggests that applying the methodology to provinces with a small dataset leads into inaccurate predictions.