Computing political preference among twitter followers

Abstract

There is great interest in understanding media bias and political information seeking preferences. As many media outlets create online personas, we seek to automatically estimate the political preferences of their audience, rather than of the outlet itself. In this paper, we present a novel method for computing preference among an organization's Twitter followers. We present an application of this technique to estimate political preference of the audiences of U.S. media outlets. We also discuss how these results may be used and extended.