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Cited by 341

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 36 of the 36 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior

Open access
DiGrazia, Joseph, McKelvey, Karissa, Bollen, Johan, Rojas, Fabio·2013·PLoS ONE

Abstract

Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? There is considerable debate about the validity of data extracted from social media for studying offline behavior. To address this issue, we show that there is a statistically significant association between tweets that mention a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives and his or her subsequent electoral performance. We demonstrate this result with an analysis of 542,969 tweets mentioning candidates selected from a random sample of 3,570,054,618, as well as Federal Election Commission data from 795 competitive races in the 2010 and 2012 U.S. congressional elections. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district's racial and gender composition. Our findings show that reliable data about political behavior can be extracted from social media.

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Metadata

Authors
DiGrazia, J., McKelvey, K., Bollen, J., & Rojas, F.
Venue
PLoS ONE
Published
2013-11-27
Volume
8
Issue
11
Pages
e79449
ISSN
1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3123712780
Cited by
341
References
36
FWCI
95.44
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1371/journal.pone.0079449
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DiGrazia, J., McKelvey, K., Bollen, J., & Rojas, F. (2013). More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior. PLoS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0079449

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