Wright State researchers track Twitter reaction to presidential debate

FAIRBORN — Researchers at Wright State University monitored social media traffic for the third and final presidential debate involving Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald Trump.

Their focus was on Twitter. The Applied Policy Research Institute at WSU studies social sciences, and that includes trends in politics. The WSU researchers have monitored all three debates.

“It’s giving us a new way to measure social media,” one of the researchers, Mike Wiehe, told News Center 7’s Natalie Jovonovich on Wednesday night.

“In the past we would look at total counts, posts that people would have,” he said. “Now we can actually get an understanding of what are they actually saying when they put out their tweet or their post.”

The APRI at Wright State, in collaboration with Kno.e.sis and local start-up Cognovi Labs, hosted a debate watch “war room” event on campus Wednesday night.

As they have been doing for the first two debates, the experts tracked real-time Twitter sentiment about the candidates, gauging their debate performances at UNLV as rated by Twitter users.