Twitter on Tuesday released a new tool that displays in realtime the relative popularity of President Barack Obama to Republican candidate Mitt Romney based on all of the millions of tweets about each candidate. Called the Twitter Political Index, the tool uses a third-party social media search engine and analysis firm called Topsy and several polling firms ( The Mellman Groupand North Star Opinion Research) to keep track of all the tweets about Obama and Romney at any given time and assigns each tweet a “sentiment score,” based on whether the tweet expresses a positive or negative view of either candidate, according to Buzzfeed.
The index then displays a daily score for each candidate and shows how the score has changed since the day before. The candidate score indicates what percentage of tweets about each respective candidate are positive relative to the overall number of tweets. Right now Obama is leading Romney 34 to 25, although Obama lost 4 points and Romney gained 2 since yesterday. Here’s a screenshot of the Index as of today:
