Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2013 Nov 27;8(11):e79449. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0079449. eCollection 2013.
Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? There is considerable debate about the validity of data extracted from social media for studying offline behavior. To address this issue, we show that there is a statistically significant association between tweets that mention a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives and his or her subsequent electoral performance. We demonstrate this result with an analysis of 542,969 tweets mentioning candidates selected from a random sample of 3,570,054,618, as well as Federal Election Commission data from 795 competitive races in the 2010 and 2012 U.S. congressional elections. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district's racial and gender composition. Our findings show that reliable data about political behavior can be extracted from social media.
社交媒体是政治行为的有效指标吗？对于从社交媒体提取的数据用于研究线下行为的有效性，存在相当大的争议。为了解决这个问题，我们表明，在提到美国众议院候选人的推文和他或她随后的选举表现之间存在统计学上显著的关联。我们通过对从 3570054618 条随机抽样的提到候选人的 542969 条推文进行分析，并结合 2010 年和 2012 年美国国会选举中 795 场竞争激烈的联邦选举委员会数据，证明了这一结果。即使在控制了现任、地区党派、竞选报道、时间以及地区种族和性别构成等人口统计变量的情况下，这一发现仍然存在。我们的研究结果表明，可以从社交媒体中提取可靠的政治行为数据。
