Social Media and Politics: Truthiness and Astroturfing
22nd November 2010
Jeremy Wagstaff is always worth reading.
Counting the number of followers a candidate has on Facebook, for example, is apparently a pretty good indicator of whether they’ll do well at the ballot box. The Daily Beast set up something called the Oracle which scanned 40,000 websites—including Twitter—to measure whether comments on candidates in the recent U.S. elections were positive, negative, neutral or mixed. It predicted 36 out of 37 Senate races and 29 out of 30 Governors’ races and nearly 98% of the House races. That’s pretty good.
November 22nd, 2010 at 19:52
Any society which replaces truth with “truthiness” is signing its own death warrant.