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As mainstream news media and political campaigns start to pay attention to the political discourse online, a systematic analysis of political speech in social media becomes more critical. What exactly do people say on these sites, and how useful is this data in estimating political popularity? In this study we examine Twitter discussions surrounding seven US Republican politicians who were running for the US Presidential nomination in 2011. We show this largely negative rhetoric to be laced with sarcasm and humor and dominated by a small portion of users. Furthermore, we show that using out-of-the-box classification tools results in a poor performance, and instead develop a highly optimized multi-stage approach designed for general-purpose political sentiment classification. Finally, we compare the change in sentiment detected in our dataset before and after 19 Republican debates, concluding that, at least in this case, the Twitter political chatter is not indicative of national political polls.
Mejova et al. (Mon,) studied this question.