Twitter on Tuesday released a new tool that displays in realtime the relative popularity of President Barack Obama to Republican candidate Mitt Romney based on all of the millions of tweets about each candidate. Called the Twitter Political Index, the tool uses a third-party social media search engine and analysis firm called Topsy and several polling firms ( The Mellman Groupand North Star Opinion Research) to keep track of all the tweets about Obama and Romney at any given time and assigns each tweet a “sentiment score,” based on whether the tweet expresses a positive or negative view of either candidate, according to Buzzfeed.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=158673