Are tweets the real estimators of election results?

Abstract

A medium with a huge amount of information like Twitter, can be analyzed for surveying the opinions or sentiments of the public towards future leaders. This paper focuses on predicting the winning party in UP elections with the help of public opinion on Twitter. The paper intends to understand whether tweets can be used as useful method in predicting the election results or is it just a social hype. Twitter API is used to extract tweets about the UP elections. Public opinion is then ascertained with the help of sentiment analysis on the tweets. After sufficient amount of tweets are collected for analysis, we are simply expanding on positive tweets and getting 45.13% for BJP, the highest percentage as compared to other parties. On comparing this result with the exit polls and the actual election results, the prediction of winning party by the twitter data analysis is correct.