Facebook Lexicon Predicts Obama Win.
The Facebook Lexicon is a very nifty tool which analyzes the frequency and associations of words in Facebook wall messages for profiles, events, and groups. The first graph below shows that Obama is mentioned significantly more frequently than Mccain, and, more importantly, the second graph shows that the mentions for Obama have more positive sentiment (e.g. “I love Obama”), versus negative sentiment (e.g. “I hate McCain”).
Figure 1: Mention frequency for Obama vs McCain on Facebook walls
Figure 2: Mention sentiment for Obama vs McCain on Facebook walls. A 70% score means that 70% of the mentions had a positive sentiment and 30% had a negative sentiment.
I am not eligible to vote this year since I procrastinated in applying for citizenship (I am due to apply this year since I had the Green Card for more than five years now). That said, if I was eligible to vote, I would vote for Obama, and the reason would be this video from Colin Powell:
Frankly, the US made a mistake by electing Bush for president in 2000, but re-electing him in 2004 was like giving the finger to the rest of the world. Electing Obama shows that the US is (1) sorry for re-electing Bush, and (2) getting over racial/religious/ethnic intolerance, these two factors would open the door for the world to accept the US back as an unbiased super power. Last, but not least, Obama just comes across as smart guy, and we didn’t have an intelligent US president for some time now
Cheers,
– amr
Nice post amr, very well put. And don’t worry about not voting, California is going blue anyway
Comment by gerster — November 3, 2008 @ 1:44 pmYeah, fact that CA is blue does in fact make me feel a bit less guilty that I did not apply for citizenship earlier
– amr
Comment by amr — November 3, 2008 @ 2:53 pmhmm, facebook has an opportunity to be a prediction market if it turns out to be true
Sajjit
Comment by Sajjit Thampy — November 3, 2008 @ 3:59 pm