A Systematic Review of Predicting Elections Based On Social Media Data

The way politicians communicate with the electorate and run electoral campaigns was reshaped by the emergence and popularization of contemporary socialmedia (SM), such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram social networks (SNs). Due to the inherent capabilities ofSM, such as the large amount of available data accessed in real time a new research subject has emerged focusing on using the SM data to predict election outcomes. Main findings include the low success of the most-used approach, namely volume and sentiment analysis on Twitter, and the better results withnew approaches, such as regression methods trained withtraditional polls. Finally, a vision of future research on integrating advances in process definitions, modeling, and evaluation is also discussed, pointing out, among others, the need for better investigating the application ofstate-of the-art machine learning approaches