Twitter changes presidential election conversations

Twitter has a significant role in shaping the political narrative and deciding the winners and losers of the U.S. presidential debates, according to Stephen Mills opined this week for the Guardian. 

Mills contends we are in “the era of Twitter,” with the last era of blogging going away. According to a reporter for the technology site Pandodaily, Hamish McKenzie, political blogs have gone from being the "first and fast reactors" to being "almost obsolete by Twitter."

Even media baron Rupert Murdoch seems to have plunged into Twitter to show what he thinks about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, Silicon Beat reported.

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Sept. 6 saw record-high tweets per minute, with the climax after President Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. 

The whole night’s event had about four million tweets. More than 9.5 million tweets were sent about the DNC during the entire DNC. The peak came at 52,756 tweets per minute following Obama’s speech, which set a new record for a political event, according to Silicon Republic. 

In August, Twitter's government and politics team announced the launch of the Twitter Political Index, a new barometer of what the public is thinking and tweeting about Obama and Governor Mitt Romney, Inc. reported. 

The Index is designed to evaluate and weigh the attitudes of tweets mentioning Obama or Romney, whether positive or negative. For example, a score of 65 for a candidate indicates that tweets are on average more positive than 65 percent of all tweets. The resulting index scores indicate how positive they are being mentioned relative to all tweets.

The Index for each candidate updates every day after 8 p.m. with a historical chart at election.twitter.com. 

The index aims to provide more nuance to political coverage, illustrating instances in which the social media conversation diverges from more traditional polls, Inc. noted.

Image: Twitter