Using the Twitter social network as a predictor in the political decision

Abstract

The use of social networks as a predictive tool to predict the outcome of an election can generate controversy; however if you have a methodology that tries to equate the extracted data as if they were obtained through a conventional survey, that is to say using weighting factors more than what usually should be done, polarity and relevance of each tweet, can make it a very reliable technique in light of the results obtained; the proposed methodology was applied in the presidential election of Ecuador on February 19th, 2017.