When Computation met Society

The title may seem redundant. Of course if you  are going to predict, you should predict the future — what else, predict the past? But, when referring to social media data it may not be that redundant. In recent years there has been an increase of research on social media data predicting the future, predicting the present, and predicting the past using knowledge acquired in the future.

Why is predicting important? Predicting is equivalent to intelligence, with an important qualification: We admire the intelligence of someone who can predict what is going to happen, but only when they can explain why they are able to do so. If one (e.g., an octopus) is able to predict without explanation, we tend to downgrade it as coincidence.

Earlier today, the Pew Research Center on Journalism published an analysis entitled “Twitter and the Campaign“. They present a detailed study of millions of tweets and blogs, about what people say on social media about the candidates for the 2012 elections. (Not too many nice things, it turns out, except for Ron Paul, who, at the same time, is trailing on the polls.)

So, what does this mean for the predictive power of Twitter? Is he going to win because tweets have good things to say about him, or will he lose because tweets have good things to say about him? (Hint: The answer is “yes”.)

Shepard Fairey meets Angry Birds: Poster of our 2011 ICWSM submission "Limits of Electoral Predictions using Twitter"

Earlier this year, with my colleagues Eni Mustafaraj, Dani Gayo-Avello and student Catherine Lui we studied this question. Can one, analyzing social media data, predict the outcome of the US congressional elections? We did not find encouraging results, in neither the Google Trends data nor the Twitter data — thus the ingenious poster above that Dani designed.

When it comes to something so important as the elections, social media will be manipulated, because the stakes are too high. One should keep that in mind as we get closer to election time and “news articles” will start appearing arguing that someone will win or lose based on the number of friends or followers this candidate has. If the author gets it right, he will make sure to remind us in the future. If he gets it wrong, he will forget it first.

Today's mentally flexible tweet. Why is this important? What is special about the last 24 hours? Who is missing?

This does not mean that nothing can be predicted using social media. Movie sales can be predicted, as Bernando Huberman and his colleague showed. Flu outbreaks and periodic sales can be predicted, too. But not elections. At least without some sophisticated filtering that makes them as representative and competitive to the professional pollsters.

Thank you, my Twitter Editors!

I am writing this on Thanksgiving day, and it is only appropriate that I will start my blogging experience with a “Thank You”. It goes out to my Twitter editors. Who are they? The people I follow on Twitter. Some people call them “Twitter friends”, but I think “Twitter Editors” is more appropriate. Let me explain.

Twitter is a “microblogging” online service. It means you can write 140-character short notes that your “followers” will see — the people that want to be informed by what you write. And you read the notes of the people you follow. To distinguish between the two, researchers often refer to this second group as your Twitter “friends“.

The way I use Twitter, is by selecting carefully who to follow. I choose to follow people that (a) talk about issues I care, and (b) they do not talk much when they do not have something to say. I do not filter out those I disagree, because they often have interesting things to say. Finding good editors is not automatic, but it is worth the effort.

These days my research interests are mainly around the technical evolution of the Social Web, the propagation of information and misinformation in social and traditional media, graph algorithms and visualization, the state of the Computer Science  and Media Arts and Sciences education, and epistemology of knowledge (how do you know what you know). You can see details of my interests in my web page.

I want to be able to follow developments in all of the above areas, but that’s very difficult: It means that I would have to scan the news from numerous publications and sources hoping to find interesting articles that I should read. That requires a lot of time and effort on a daily basis. I can’t do it while keeping my sanity.

Here is where my Twitter Editors come in: They are also interested in some of the issues I am, and they tweet about them. They put effort into choosing the 140 characters of a tweet and they often provide a link to the original source. Very often, they point me to some piece of information that I would have missed. And I try to return the favor: I am also trying to be a good editor for those who follow me. I think it is a fair deal, one that increases the quality in the overflow of information we are experiencing.

Being Greek, I also care a lot about the current situation and dialogs in my native country. But I cannot do it with a single Twitter account, since my followers would see items written in a language they may not be able to read. Likely, they may not care, either. So, I have a second Twitter account for issues related to Greek culture and politics. Of course, I choose my Greek Twitter editors with the same criteria.

Twitter, unlike Facebook, allows you to separate your friends and followers, and this is what makes it possible to create your group of Editors. This is also the reason I do not use Facebook (though I have an account). The signal-to-noise ratio in Facebook is too low for me.

I am sure that there are many models on using Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the other popular social network services, I am just describing the model that works for me. I highly recommend it. But it only works thanks to my Editors. Thank you!