Click on pictures to enlarge.
Poll findings
1) Independent Siobhan Benita is polling third on Twitter slightly ahead of the Greens.
2) The three establishment parties with male candidates all have more negative tweets than positive. The Independent and Green female candidates have more positive ratings.
3) Ken Livingstone has both the largest number of tweets about him and is the most polarising figure with more positive and negative tweets about him than anyone else. The number of his negative tweets are significantly above Boris.
4) Boris Johnson isn't that far behind Ken Livingstone but hasn't got his higher number of negative tweets. It's hard to say that Johnson is ahead but his lower negative rating than Ken with be a source of pleasure for his campaign.
5) Jenny Jones is doing better than the Lib Dems and has along with the Independent Siobhan Benita more positive than negative tweets.
6) Brian Paddick has fallen behind both the Green Jenny Jones and Independent Siobhan Benita and has the lowest number of positive tweets of any of the 5 candidates featured in the poll. This is not great performance from the Lib Dems.
7) Both the BNP and UKIP clearly aren't putting enough effort in as I only found 1 tweet about each of their candidates.So they have been excluded for this poll.
How does this poll work?
I scraped Twitter for tweets containing both the name of the candidate eg "Ken Livingstone" or their main tweeter feed eg "@Ken4London". If anyone can find a tweeter feed for the UKIP candidate Lawrence Webb then please tell me! He seems rather elusive.
The poll was limited to tweets made on the 7th and 8th April. I then used the sentiment package in R to classify the tweets into Postive, Neutral or Negative categories.
Is this poll perfect and will it reflect what we happen on election day?
The short answer is no and we'll see. The slightly longer answer is Twitter's user base isn't a proper sample of the entire London population but as Twitter becomes more popular and is taken up by more sections of society the more representative it becomes. It should also enable quicker snapshots to be taken than traditional polling techniques. It'll be more able to detect sudden swings in public opinion. If one of the candidates gets on TV and says something that enrages the people we should be able to measure the reaction. This is an experiment and it will evolve over time. I'll note any methodological changes here on the blog.
I'm going to do this poll daily until the election. Monday's poll should be out about Midnight.
I guess it was a bad idea for Brian's team to pick the hashtag #paddickpower then, because your scraper on't pick those up...
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to be fair to all the parties, so I want to scrap same full name or twitter handle where they've got it for all the parties. This methodology my not be favourable to Ken and Boris but they're still out in fron which is where the traditional polling is putting them.
ReplyDeletePart of the problem of those kind of hashtags is I suspect they would be mainly used by party activists and we can make a pretty good guess how they're going to vote.
It would be interesting to see how popular hashtags like #paddickpower, #sackboris #notkenagain are and I may have a look at them before the election is out but I want to get the main poll running nicely first.