A Systematic Review of Predicting Elections Based on Social Media Data: Research Challenges and Future Directions

Análise de Sentimento em Tweets Relacionados ao Desmatamento da Floresta Amazônica

“…Já [O'Leary 2015] identificou estudos nessas e em outras áreas adicionais como vendas de quaisquer produtos e até o resultado de partidas de futebol. Apesar de tantas aplicac ¸ões possíveis, a previsão do resultado eleitoral baseado nos dados das redes sociais, é um dos tópicos mais estudados, apresentando dezenas de estudos específicos [Brito et al 2021].…”

Correlations of social media performance and electoral results in Brazilian presidential elections

“…Two very recent papers summarize these initiatives. Chauhan et al (Chauhan et al, 2020), surveyed 38 papers, andBrito et al (Brito et al, 2021) performed a systematic review of 83 relevant studies. Both reviews highlight that most studies have used Twitter as a corpus for correlating SM and election results based on volume and sentiment analysis.…”

“…However, some studies challenge this approach (Gayo-Avello et al, 2011;Jungherr et al, 2012;Jungherr et al, 2017), and Brito et al also found that only 55% of the 64 studies that used this approach obtained success. Both survey studies (Brito et al, 2021;Chauhan et al, 2020) also highlight that the existence of irrelevant, junk, fake, or spam posts can affect the results, as well as the challenges of accurate sentiment analysis on tweets, which are small texts. Moreover, (Brito et al, 2021) highlighted the difficulties in using data from multiple networks besides Twitter, and the positive effect of collecting data for long periods (from 45 to 120 days before elections).…”

“…In this new scenario, SM is used extensively in campaigns, and an online campaign's success can even decide elections. As a consequence, much academic research has been devoted to this modern political campaign paradigm and its activities (Carlisle & Patton, 2013;Jungherr, 2016), such as how well Facebook and Twitter users reflect the general voting public (Jungherr, 2016;Mellon & Prosser, 2017), how the sentiment of conversations is connected to real-world events affecting a political campaign (Park, 2013) and whether it is possible to predict election results based on SM analysis (Brito et al, 2021;Tumasjan et al, 2010).…”

“…Despite many initiatives aiming to study candidates' SM behavior and its correlation with electoral results, many of them are constrained by the technical challenges of collecting SM data, especially from Facebook and Instagram. As a result, as presented in very recent surveys (Brito et al, 2021;Chauhan et al, 2020) most studies are limited to a small timeframe (some days before election day), and to Twitter posts, from which it is easier to collect data. Also, most studies focus on the sentiment analysis of citizens' posts about candidates, forgetting the valuable information that can be gathered from the candidates' networks.…”