What's in Twitter: I Know What Parties are Popular and Who You are Supporting Now!

In modern politics, parties and individual candidates must have an online presence and usually have dedicated social media coordinators. In this context, we study the usefulness of analysing Twitter messages to identify both the characteristics of political parties and the political leaning of users. As a case study, we collected the main stream of Twitter related to the 2010 UK General Election during the associated period - gathering around 1,150,000 messages from about 220,000 users. We examined the characteristics of the three main parties in the election and highlighted the main differences between parties. First, Labour members were the most active and influential during the election while Conservative members were the most organized to promote their activities. Second, the websites and blogs that each political party's members supported are clearly different from those that all the other political parties' members supported. From these observations, we develop a simple and practical classification method which uses the number of Twitter messages referring to a particular political party. The experimental results showed that the proposed classification method achieved about 86% classification accuracy and outperforms other classification methods that require expensive costs for tuning classifier parameters and/or knowledge about network topology.