Fox News is partnering with Twitter to measure viewer sentiment in real time for the next of the never-ending Republican debates.
During Monday’s GOP showdown in South Carolina, the cable news network will measure tweeters’ reactions to the candidates’ answers and display them on FoxNews.com in a swing-o-meter.
Viewers are being asked to tweet the hashtags #answer or #dodge, depending on how they think Mitt Romney, Ron Paul et al. actually responded to the question posed to them. Fox News tested the sentiment meter during the Iowa debate last month.
Once the grandstanding is done and dusted for another evening, Fox News and its commentators will attempt to use that data in their analysis of the debate.
There’s an official hashtag for the debate, #scdebate, which will undoubtedly be a potent combination of considered reactions and jokes soon after the debate kicks off at 9 p.m. EST.
Of course, Twitter has been a focal point for detecting and analyzing voter reactions to candidates throughout the campaign. It’s been used to solicit questions from viewers during a CNN debate, to make fun of the presidential hopefuls, and been leveraged by long-shot candidates like Jon Huntsman and Buddy Roemer.
Tracking and measuring predefined hashtags is a great way to gather real-time Twitter consensus on a specific issue. Simply revealing whether the Twitter hive mind believes a candidate answered or dodged a question will make for fairly soft criticism, though this is another step towards making tangible, valuable sense of the Twitter data firehose.
Now if only Fox News and Twitter could create a real-time fact-checker.
Photo by IowaPolitics.com