Oxford spin-out TheySay gives social victory to Miliband in first of the UK general election debates.
TheySay, a spin-out of Oxford University which measures sentiments on social media platforms, has awarded the first UK election debate to Labour leader Ed Miliband.
The artificial intelligence firm, spun out last year, is tracking social media sentiments towards the UK’s main political parties, Labour, Conservatives, and Liberal Democrats, as well as Eurosceptic, libertarian populist party United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), as the country gears up towards going to the ballot box next month on 7 May.
Both incumbent Conservative Party Prime Minister David Cameron and challenger Ed Miliband took part in the televised debate last night, which was held in the style of two back-to-back job interviews following Cameron’s dodging of a direct head-to-head with the Labour leader. The debate, in which both were grilled by veteran interviewer Jeremy Paxman, generated nearly half a million tweets.
TheySay’s technology can rate the tweets as either positive or negative, and is even advanced enough to detect humour and sarcasm, according to the Oxford team. The firm tracked 210,864 tweets for Cameron, and 284,896 for Miliband. Cameron received 47% positive sentiment and 53% negative, while Miliband edged the Prime Minister with 52% positive, 48% negative, awarding him the debate.
TheySay’s decision to hand Miliband the debate is in contradiction to numerous political pundits in the UK, who mostly gave Cameron the slight upper hand in terms of performance.
Karo Moilanen, co-founder of TheySay, added: “Most notably, both candidates generated a gigantic volume of negative sentiment overall. In general, Miliband’s signals were more volatile than those for Cameron. Miliband’s sentiment profile is more jagged – a sign of more extreme polarisation. Given that doubt, anger, agitation, and fear all increased towards the end around Miliband, his passionate plea was highly highly emotional. Speculation increased towards the end around both candidates. Miliband’s impressive performance generated more traffic than Cameron’s first round – in a typical situation, the PM dominates in Social Media volume; he also created many more humorous comments in Social Media.”
The spin-out will continue to follow social media sentiments towards political parties in the UK during the election, including a seven-way debate which plans to include the environmentalist and anti-neoliberalism Green Party as well as nationalist parties Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party.
