Abstract
Polls have long been a tool for gauging public opinion, whether in general or in relation to specific events. Poll results, however, take a few days to be collected and published. Trending twitter hashtags, in contrast, are keywords that capture public sentiments about current events and could serve as a data source for gauging real-time changes in public opinion. This paper examines trending Twitter hashtags following the release of James Comey’s letter to Congress shortly before the 2016 US presidential election day. I find that trending Twitter hashtags mirror and, more importantly, precede the poll results of the same period.
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Lee, H.W. (2018). Using Twitter Hashtags to Gauge Real-Time Changes in Public Opinion: An Examination of the 2016 US Presidential Election. In: Staab, S., Koltsova, O., Ignatov, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11186. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01159-8_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01159-8_16
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