This is a reintroduction, a reappearance. Mayflies come out only once every two years, right? Or is that cicadas? Back to you on that one.
In any case: Pollchatter is a site meant to help make sense of the bewildering stream of election content on Twitter. It tracks tweets that reference any of 117 competitive House and Senate races in the 2020 U.S. elections, and allows users to explore trends – what hashtags are being used and how, what districts specific content is appearing in, who’s out there pushing what kind of ideas, and whether “bot-like users” might be playing a role.
I’m focusing on House and Senate races because they often fly under the national media’s radar. Everyone in the world is looking at the presidential race this year, but Congress is where the policy will get made, and where we’ll learn whether we still have a functioning democratic system. The jury’s out on that one.
As in 2018, there are caveats here. Because the site is using Twitter’s free API (this is a small, independent, unfunded project), it doesn’t have access to every Tweet being posted (for more technical information, go here).
For this reason, it’s best to think of the service as a window, rather than a microscope. However, it’s a useful one; there are already millions of posts in the database, and the data flow is only going to accelerate over the next two months.
Another issue: One of the key goals is to identify and track the way that bots and trolls are trying to interfere in these races. This is distinctly a work in progress. The “Botweather” page of the site, and the “bot-like user” ratings included here and there throughout, draw on ratings produced by the Botometer project at Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media. Currently (as of Sept. 09), the ratings used are based on the version 3 of that tool. A version 4 has just been released, and I’ll be updating the site to use those ratings shortly – however, the project’s update has been rather controversial, and the scores need to be treated with some care (see this thread.
I’ll be writing more about that later.
Otherwise, given the massive amounts of misinformation online, I’m being as transparent as I can about how this is funded and how it operates, and what its goals are (and what mine are):
- Funding: Easy. There isn’t any.
- Creator: I’m John Borland, an American writer, translator and coder living in Berlin, Germany. I have a few other people advising me, but I’m doing all the coding myself.
- Code: All the code can be found on Github. The tech details (tools, languages, frameworks, etc.) can be found at “How to use this site“.
- Ulterior motives: Who has time for ulterior anything these days? I wasn’t originally a Biden supporter, but I’m doing all I can to make sure he and Harris win. We’ll work on pushing them toward the policies we want afterward. It’s not at all hyperbole to say that there’s a country, a democracy, and a planetary ecosystem at stake. That said, the data on this site is not biased to the left or right in any way. Check out the methodology in the “About” page, or read the code on Github, if you have any concerns.
If you have any questions or comments, please drop me a line.