For all its great benefits, Twitter is a nightmare. Particularly for political dialogue.
It’s difficult to tell what’s real. The level of discourse is occasionally elevated, but more often resembles hundreds of people shouting in a crowded room together. And it’s very hard to get any sense for what’s happening on a larger scale.
That’s where Pollchatter comes in.
Pollchatter creates a daily archive of content referencing every competitive race in the 2018 U.S. congressional elections, identifies trends, and displays aggregate data on top posters, top hashtags, and posts by “bots or bot-like users.”
This means that for every competitive U.S. House or Senate race, Pollchatter users can see what’s being talked about, by who. If issues are crossing district borders, this becomes visible immediately. If a particular Twitter user is posting frequently, trying to influence debate in a single district or across the country, this will show up right away.
The site doesn’t identify Twitter users by anything other than screen name. We believe in preserving individual privacy, to the extent that individuals want this.
Nor is it a perfect representation of the full Twitterverse. Because the site is using Twitter’s free API (we’re a small, independent, unfunded project), it doesn’t have access to every Tweet being posted (for more technical information, see here).
For this reason, it’s best to think of the service as a window, rather than a microscope. However, it’s a useful one; we already have millions of posts in our database, and the data flow is only going to accelerate over the next two months.
As the election nears, we’ll be posting observations from the site here. But if you see something you think we or the world should be paying attention to, please feel free to contact us! And of course, if you see any errors on the site, let us know.