Don't Turn Social Media Into Another 'Literary Digest' Poll

Content published in microblogging systems like Twitter can be data-mined to take the pulse of society, and a number of studies have praised the value of relatively simple approaches to sampling, opinion mining, and sentiment analysis. Today Twitter is a source of information on such events, updated by millions of users worldwide reacting to events as they unfold, often in real time. It was only a matter of time before the research community turned to it as a rich source of social, commercial, marketing, and political information. An API parameter to indicate a geographical area was used to consider only tweets published by US residents. In addition, another API parameter was used to indicate a temporal interval for the query. Despite the extensive literature on automatic sentiment analysis, virtually all current research on microblogging analysis relies on rather simple methods.