TY - GEN
T1 - A comparative study of social media and traditional polling in the Egyptian uprising of 2011
AU - Weiss, Lora
AU - Briscoe, Erica
AU - Hayes, Heather
AU - Kemenova, Olga
AU - Harbert, Sim
AU - Li, Fuxin
AU - Lebanon, Guy
AU - Stewart, Chris
AU - Steiger, Darby Miller
AU - Foy, Dan
PY - 2013/3/14
Y1 - 2013/3/14
N2 - Because social network sites such as Twitter are increasingly being used to express opinions and attitudes, the utility of using these sites as legitimate and immediate information sources is of growing interest. This research examines how well information derived from social media aligns with that from more traditional polling methods. Specifically, this research examines tweets from over 40,000 Egyptian users from both before and after the Egyptian uprising on January 25, 2011 and compares that information with polling data collected by The Gallup Organization during the same time period. This analysis ascertains trends in sentiment and identifies the extent to which these methodologies align over time. The results show that trends across the two sources are not consistent. Focusing solely on Twitter data, individuals expressed increasingly negative opinions after the uprising, whereas survey results indicated that individuals were increasingly positive post-uprising. We discuss the implications of these differences for the use of social media as a real-time information source.
AB - Because social network sites such as Twitter are increasingly being used to express opinions and attitudes, the utility of using these sites as legitimate and immediate information sources is of growing interest. This research examines how well information derived from social media aligns with that from more traditional polling methods. Specifically, this research examines tweets from over 40,000 Egyptian users from both before and after the Egyptian uprising on January 25, 2011 and compares that information with polling data collected by The Gallup Organization during the same time period. This analysis ascertains trends in sentiment and identifies the extent to which these methodologies align over time. The results show that trends across the two sources are not consistent. Focusing solely on Twitter data, individuals expressed increasingly negative opinions after the uprising, whereas survey results indicated that individuals were increasingly positive post-uprising. We discuss the implications of these differences for the use of social media as a real-time information source.
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-37210-0_33
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-37210-0_33
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84874802046
SN - 9783642372094
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 303
EP - 310
BT - Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction - 6th International Conference, SBP 2013, Proceedings
T2 - 6th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction, SBP 2013
Y2 - 2 April 2013 through 5 April 2013
ER -