Fueling the horse race of ideas in the 2016 election
Here at the Laboratory for Social Machines, within the the MIT Media Lab, we believe technology can help offer an alternative to the horse-race journalism that has dominated election news for the last half-century. The Electome surfaced and tracked 2016 U.S. election issues the public cares about, or what we call “The Horse Race of Ideas.” Drawing from areas of computer science including machine learning, natural language processing, and network analysis, we explored how three separate forces—the campaign journalism, the messaging of the candidates, and the public’s response in the digital sphere—converged to shape the presidential election’s most important narratives as well as its outcome. We provided analytics to drive election coverage by leading newsrooms such as The Washington Post, Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fusion, and Vice News. The Electome also proudly partnered with the Commission for Presidential Debates to provide analytics briefs to the moderators of all the presidential and vice-presidential debates. Thanks to data partnerships with Twitter and the Roper Center at Cornell University, our lab accessed the entire database of tweets, with hundreds of millions of new ones added each day, the social graph of Twitter, and election-related polls for our key analyses.