USA TODAY launches Twitter Political Issues Index

USA TODAY and Twitter have partnered to launch the USA TODAY/Twitter Political Issues Index, an interactive visualization of political tweets about a range of key issues.

The index uses issue "frames" built by Twitter to capture the most relevant terms in tweets that appear to be political in nature. For example, if a user tweets, "I went to the doctor today," it would not be counted among the political tweets for the index. But if the user tweeted, "I went to the doctor — Obamacare," it would be counted as a political tweet.

The index is a daily compilation of what is at the moment about a million tweets a day, according to Adam Sharp, head of news, government and elections for Twitter. That number is likely to rise as Election Day approaches.

Twitter is also providing USA TODAY with aggregate data on the age and gender breakdown of the conversations, based on Twitter's analysis of users' tweets. USA TODAY does not have access to this data on any individual tweet.

The tweets are tallied by their state of origin, but Twitter has set a threshold of tweet volume below which a state's results will not be shown because the small number of tweets could compromise the privacy of individual users. State data is shown on a tweets-per-capita basis, and the District of Columbia is removed because its tweet volume drowns out others.

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Sharp said, "These visuals give us a real-time snapshot of the conversation state-by-state around this campaign and politics in general."

He likens the visualization to how a spectator enjoys a sporting event. "It wouldn't be as interesting if you were the only one sitting in the stadium." The index helps to "illustrate the roar of the crowd around them — these things you are tweeting about you are not alone. It is a way to hold a mirror up to that public real-time conversation as people engage in it."

Note that the index makes no attempt to analyze the sentiment expressed in tweets — only the subject area. For now, USA TODAY has also chosen not to compare tweet volume around various candidate names because in the last days of the campaign swing, so much of the Twitter traffic around candidates is driven by campaigns, consultants and other professional partisans. USA TODAY plans to keep the index running past the election and to experiment with other ways of displaying the texture of Twitter's political conversation.

Alan Rosenblatt, senior vice president for digital strategy at communications firm turner4D, said that while it is unclear whether Twitter reflects voting behavior or other public engagement, "what is happening on Twitter is part of a larger conversation that is happening many places. The play (an issue) is getting on Twitter sets up how it is being talked about elsewhere," he said.

Fabio Rojas, a sociology professor at Indiana University, said that unlike traditional polls, social media trackers are "picking up what people think to be important at a certain period of time. … That's extremely useful because polls are very structured. You have to come up with the questions before hand." But in social media, "people volunteer what they think is important," providing a much better real-time assessment of what's on their minds, he said.