A research paper published this past week suggests that, in an analysis of 435 U.S. House of Representative elections in 2010, just looking at the frequency a candidate’s name was mentioned on Twitter could be used to predict the election outcome.
But here’s the crazy thing — it didn’t matter what was said about the candidate — positive, negative or neutral. What mattered was how much the candidate’s name was tweeted by supporters, foes, or just randomly.
The researchers could predict the outcome in 404 out of 435 races — an astounding prediction rate of 92.8 percent.
But there’s a catch… and it’s a big one.