WHAT DO YOUR
TWEETS SAY
ABOUT YOUR
POLITICS?
What do your tweets make other people think about your political views? If you are an American Twitter user, log-in to our app below to see how how our model scores your tweets on a continuum from "very liberal" to "very conservative." Note: you may need to disable ad or pop-up blockers in order to use this tool. To learn more about how we protect your privacy, visit this link.
HOW DOES
THIS WORK?
Our model makes an estimate of the ideology of your tweets using machine learning techniques. First, we collected public opinion data about the political views of a large group of Republicans and Democrats in the United States. Next, we asked those people for permission to collect the text of all public messages they've posted on Twitter. We then trained a model to predict the ideology of any user that learns from patterns in the groups of words Republicans and Democrats use in their tweets. Our final model was accurate at predicting the political orientation of 76% the people we studied.
WHAT DOES
THIS MEAN?
Did your score surprise you? Though it's possible that our model misclassified you, most people are unaware of how their political views compare to those of others-- particularly people in the other political party. To learn more about this phenomenon, often called "false polarization" check out Chapter Eight of Chris's book Breaking the Social Media Prism.
WHAT SHOULD
I DO NEXT?
To learn more about how your views compare to the average Republican and the average Democrat, try our ideology quiz. Once you receive your score, compare it to the one created on this page in order to see whether your online behavior is consistent with your political views. The disconnect between the way we present ourselves online and off is one of the key drivers of political polarization on our platforms, according to our research.
F.A.Q.s
Can I measure the someone else's ideology?
Unfortunately, Twitter's policies only allow us to display this score for individual users themselves.
Why can't you do this for Facebook or other social media sites?
Unfortunately, Twitter is currently the only social media site that allows us to collect enough social media posts from people in order to estimate the strength of their political ideology.
What if I think my score is wrong?
Our model is just that-- a model. You may have heard the old saying "all models are wrong, but some are useful. Our model might be particularly wrong if you don't tweet about politics very often. Keep in mind that our tool only studies the text of any messages you produce, and not the accounts you follow or the tweets you like.