DISQUS

mdoeff · 1 year ago

I noticed a few people spamming the #votereport hashtag on election day. For example, check out all of these tweets by (fake) @SarahPalin http://tinyurl.com/5w26cq

Jesse Stay · 1 year ago

The issue here though is that those doing the study themselves were spamming and included their own spam in the reports. There was some other motive at play here, can't say what.

Ryan Jerz · 1 year ago

A couple of things here. First, everyone has a bias or two. We did not decide to look into the data until well after the announcement of the Vote Report and about midway through election day itself. Things happened that prompted us to look further. For instance, people were being excluded for what seemed like arbitrary reasons. That's fine. The Vote Report belonged to the people doing it, but you can't NOT follow your own rules then try to pass things off as legitimate. I posted the egg salad tweet to see if it would get through. It did. That's no different than the tweets posted by one of the volunteers for the Vote Report posting over one third of the tweets from our home state of Nevada. It actually proves our point - that the data is basically useless for any serious research.

Second, we focused solely on Nevada because we're local bloggers. As a blogger, I was emailed several times leading up to to Election Day and asked to help promote the project. I did on two different blogs. As the tweets started rolling in, I came to realize I had been duped. It was more an effort at marketing a few people's skills as "social media organizers" than a real report. Hence, looking at data.

The bottom line is that the voting system is more reliable than the project set up to identify problems. The assumed bias of simply starting this project hasn't even been brought up. Fortunately for democracy, election day was without major problems. The Twitter Vote Report, unfortunately, had a lot of them.

Jesse Stay · 1 year ago

Ryan, so you're saying a study that focuses only on Nevada data is one to be taken seriously? You purposely left out the fact that the quote in your release was from yourself - I'm the one that feels duped here. I'm curious as to your real motivations here - I think everyone knows this wasn't a serious study, but it was a great cause, formed by a group of people willing to share their talents for free, and a lot of hard work was put into it. I don't care if they want credit for being "social media organizers" or not - it was a fun service, one that was actually quite interesting, and whether or not anything huge came out of it, I think it's setting the foundations for something much greater. I don't see them claiming a huge success or anything so I wonder why you need to go out and show it wasn't. I'm going to be the last one to criticize such an effort - I applaud it, and hope more people are motivated to do such things around election season.

Ryan Jerz · 1 year ago

Jesse,

Links were provided, as was contact information. We were certainly not trying to hide anything regarding that one post. And you're correct. The idea is a good one, and if executed properly, could have been great. It wasn't. That's the point of what we did-to show that there were major flaws. You can question my motivation, but I am here answering you and providing context. We don't have to agree, but it's important to see all that's out there and make your own decisions.

bconrad · 1 year ago

The reason for not mentioning that the example in the news release belonged to Ryan's has been addressed in the comments located here: http://thegoodthebadthespin.com/2008/11/09/a-po... Basically, it was my oversight and I freely admit it.

The point remains, however. Ryan's tweet was one example of dozens that could have demonstrated how posted comments were irrelevant to the hyped intent of the Twitter Vote Report.

My motivations are also addressed in the comments section of the post on my blog.

As far the study not being serious or thorough, that's debatable. It was NOT peer reviewed -- a legitimate criticism -- but the thought that went into the data analysis is arguably more sensitive in regards to handling the data than the Twitter Vote Report was AND we provided point-by-point justifications for why we handled the data as we did, unlike the TVR.

Moreover, the analysis clearly states this (which you neglected to add into your post):

"My opinion is that this second analysis means that the data are meaningless as to the
relative success of the Twitter Vote Report if Nevada’s posts are at all characteristic of
the rest of the states in the country. An analysis of other states is probably warranted to
see if these results are consistent elsewhere."

With that in mind, I will be examining data from two more states to see if the inconsistencies seen in Nevada are similar elsewhere.

Stay tuned.

bconrad · 1 year ago

The picture associated with my comment is NOT ME. Not sure how that got up there. Yikes.