Abstract
Online social media such as Twitter are widely used for mining public opinions and sentiments on various issues and topics. The sheer volume of the data generated and the eager adoption by the online-savvy public are helping to raise the profile of online media as a convenient source of news and public opinions on social and political issues as well. Due to the uncontrollable biases in the population who heavily use the media, however, it is often difficult to measure how accurately the online sphere reflects the offline world at large, undermining the usefulness of online media. One way of identifying and overcoming the online–offline discrepancies is to apply a common analytical and modeling framework to comparable data sets from online and offline sources and cross-analyzing the patterns found therein. In this paper we study the political spectra constructed from Twitter and from legislators' voting records as an example to demonstrate the potential limits of online media as the source for accurate public opinion mining, and how to overcome the limits by using offline data simultaneously.
Highlights
The proliferation of online social media services such as Twitter is widely recognized as signifying a revolution in how we utilize information and understand the way our society communicates
In this paper we demonstrate the process using as an example the landscape of political spectra constructed from distinct online and offline data of the U.S and South Korea, two nations with modern representative democracies
The data contain all legislators who owned an official Twitter account at the time of data collection and maintained their seat during the entire term considered. This resulted in 67 senators, 698 roll calls, and 139 806 Twitter users for the U.S, and 194 assembly members, 1 119 roll calls, and 124 341 Twitter users for Korea. Both countries have two-party systems, the Republican Party (GOP) and the Democratic Party (DEM) that account for 99% of the U.S Senate, and the Grand National Party (GNP) and the Korean Democratic Party (DP) that account for 86% of the Korean National Assembly. [12]
Summary
The proliferation of online social media services such as Twitter is widely recognized as signifying a revolution in how we utilize information and understand the way our society communicates. It presents an open opportunity for any interested party to utilize the massive data accrued from such services for understanding the world as well as ourselves [1, 2]. Among many attempts to harness the potential of online social media, a prominent one is to mine the opinions and sentiments of the public for a variety of purposes, either academic or commercial [3,4,5,6]. User profiles collected by online social media and made available to researchers frequently fall short of giving a sufficiently accurate demographic information about the users, and the traditional polling techniques using questionnaires have to be PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0124722 April 27, 2015
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