4 ms·

The news article is misrepresenting several things: 1) Obviously, Twitter is not representative of the whole internet and its users. Twitter has a particularly

The news article is misrepresenting several things: 1) Obviously, Twitter is not representative of the whole internet and its users. Twitter has a particularly activistic base, so it's no wonder "happiness" went down after Trump got elected. 2) It misrepresents the performance of the sentiment analysis method used: This is based on sentiment detection research done in 2011 explained here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0026752 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... They used a fairly simple lexicon-based sentiment analysis approach which even in 2011 was not even close to the state-of-the-art. They first create a sentiment/subjectivity dictionary by letting MTurkers rate words in different categories such as "happiness", "laughter", "greed", "hate", etc. For the final "positivity" score they add the matching words in Twitter posts. This is a simple and efficient approach but produces fairly unreliable results w.r.t. negation, valence shifting, etc. Even in 2011, machine learning approaches were much better usually.

chippy 8y ago
Regarding twitter, the population growed and changed composition over time too. For example pre and Post Oprah around 2009 and explosive growth until 2014 when it slowed somewhat. So even if it's not a good representative of the whole internet, it's not a good representative of itself when looked at over time. One would have to use the same cohort of users from each year with the assumption that their usage stayed the same.
sametmax 8y ago
And of course it's limited to english, so far from "the internet". And indeed, Trump has been elected for getting the majority of votes, yet it represents it as a sad day, while I'm pretty sure most voters were happy.
- jaredsohn 8y ago
  Hillary won the popular vote. Also non-voters (including younger people who are ineligible or just didn't vote) and people outside of the US have opinions on such things.
  - billfruit 8y ago
    I feel that Clinton winning the popular vote is also a statement that does not give a clear picture, iirc, her popular vote majority was entirely due to her humongous majority in the single state of California, if you exclude the outlier of that single state and consider the figure from the remaining 51 states, then Clinton no longer has a majority on the votes.
    - Retra 8y ago
      California is over 1/10th the US population. Why would you just ignore it?
      - ben509 8y ago
        Their electors got to vote. Same as how they have two Senators like every other state. And let's toss this question back at you: why does California routinely ignore all of California outside LA and San Francisco? Similarly, why did all the polls and candidates (including Republicans!) other than Trump entirely ignore the rust belt? That's why his win came out of nowhere, after all. Obviously those areas are less populated, but why should a minority not have representation? Larger picture, how do you manage a union of states when not even states but a handful of cities hold all the political influence? If we switch to a popular vote, a handful of coastal cities will have a lock on the federal government. In the long run, it's called the United States because states are sovereign political entities, and that union works because small states have political influence. Instead of eliminating the electoral college, Democrats would do far better if they got back to their roots as the party of the working class.
        dontreact 8y ago
        This thread just seems like changing the goalposts. It started with someone saying that Trump won the majority of the votes. Which is just not true. That is all
        Retra 8y ago
        You're making a lot of presumptive, imprecise, and careless claims. I disagree with your conclusions, and I question the validity of your assumptions. If you want to have this discussion, I'd urge you to engage in a more digestible and exacting approach, rather than trying to ramble your way through the topic.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Um, I'm in the UK, but I thought Trump didn't get a majority, and in fact got less votes than Clinton; it was the electoral college system that put him in. Wikipedia confirms that, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_president..., 46% Republican, 48% Democrat. So?
  - dashundchen 8y ago
    Reality distortion on the right. Trump has falsely claimed (lied) that he won the popular vote, so his supporters parrot it, when it's clearly not true.

chippy 8y ago

Regarding twitter, the population growed and changed composition over time too. For example pre and Post Oprah around 2009 and explosive growth until 2014 when it slowed somewhat. So even if it's not a good representative of the whole internet, it's not a good representative of itself when looked at over time. One would have to use the same cohort of users from each year with the assumption that their usage stayed the same.

sametmax 8y ago

And of course it's limited to english, so far from "the internet". And indeed, Trump has been elected for getting the majority of votes, yet it represents it as a sad day, while I'm pretty sure most voters were happy.

jaredsohn 8y ago
Hillary won the popular vote. Also non-voters (including younger people who are ineligible or just didn't vote) and people outside of the US have opinions on such things.
- billfruit 8y ago
  I feel that Clinton winning the popular vote is also a statement that does not give a clear picture, iirc, her popular vote majority was entirely due to her humongous majority in the single state of California, if you exclude the outlier of that single state and consider the figure from the remaining 51 states, then Clinton no longer has a majority on the votes.
  - Retra 8y ago
    California is over 1/10th the US population. Why would you just ignore it?
    - ben509 8y ago
      Their electors got to vote. Same as how they have two Senators like every other state. And let's toss this question back at you: why does California routinely ignore all of California outside LA and San Francisco? Similarly, why did all the polls and candidates (including Republicans!) other than Trump entirely ignore the rust belt? That's why his win came out of nowhere, after all. Obviously those areas are less populated, but why should a minority not have representation? Larger picture, how do you manage a union of states when not even states but a handful of cities hold all the political influence? If we switch to a popular vote, a handful of coastal cities will have a lock on the federal government. In the long run, it's called the United States because states are sovereign political entities, and that union works because small states have political influence. Instead of eliminating the electoral college, Democrats would do far better if they got back to their roots as the party of the working class.
      - dontreact 8y ago
        This thread just seems like changing the goalposts. It started with someone saying that Trump won the majority of the votes. Which is just not true. That is all
      - Retra 8y ago
        You're making a lot of presumptive, imprecise, and careless claims. I disagree with your conclusions, and I question the validity of your assumptions. If you want to have this discussion, I'd urge you to engage in a more digestible and exacting approach, rather than trying to ramble your way through the topic.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Um, I'm in the UK, but I thought Trump didn't get a majority, and in fact got less votes than Clinton; it was the electoral college system that put him in. Wikipedia confirms that, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_president..., 46% Republican, 48% Democrat. So?
- dashundchen 8y ago
  Reality distortion on the right. Trump has falsely claimed (lied) that he won the popular vote, so his supporters parrot it, when it's clearly not true.