Splunk announced that the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) is helping its IT team prepare to host the final U.S. Presidential election debate on Wednesday, October 19th to help ensure UNLV’s web properties and network infrastructure stay online during an expected spike in traffic during the debate.
Splunk said it will also help proactively monitor and analyse the debate’s associated web and social media data.
In reports a UK professor said the number of tweets favouring Donald Trump during the last debate was boosted four fold by use of Bots.
The BBC reported that the research into these alleged bots was ‘led by Prof Philip Howard, from the University of Oxford, and is part of a wider project exploring “computational propaganda”.’
It reported that the results suggested that 32.7% of pro-Trump tweets had been posted by bots and 22.3% of pro-Clinton ones, totalling around 560,000 supporting Trump and 121,000 in favour of Clinton.
The study examined activity on the night of the debate and for three days after. It said it mapped tweeters with high volumes of tweets and using similar or exact phrases and hashtags.
Social media is a key political platform for both candidates. Donald Trump has 12.5m twitter followers @reatDonaldTrump and Hillary Clinton has 9.79m followers @HillaryClinton.
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The debate on September 26th generated 10 million tweets with energy, foreign affairs, terrorism and guns generating much of the activity.
During the first debate The Political Social Media Research Group at the University of Tennessee monitored sentiment for and against both candidates across social media.
What happened on social during the first debate
The group said it will monitor social media during the remaining presidential debate (October 19) and on election night (November 8).
They will post real-time analysis on their social media platforms and issue end-of-night reports for all these events.
The Political Social Media Group is based in the School of Journalism and Electronic Media in UT’s College of Communication and Information.
The group is using the college’s new Adam Brown Social Media Command Center to monitor various social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and Instagram to spot trends and flashpoints—issues that spur the most social chatter—and also judge the sentiment of the chatter.
The Adam Brown Social Media Command Center uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio. The center was built and is operated through a fund established for the college by Brown, an alumnus of the college who is now executive strategist for the San Francisco–based firm Salesforce.
Follow the Political Social Media Research Group’s analysis by following it on:
- Twitter (@PSMRG_UTK)
- Facebook (The Political Social Media Research Group)
- Instagram (@psmrg_utk)
- Medium (PSMRG)
According to the commission of presidential debates Chris Wallace, of Fox News moderator of the third 2016 presidential debate, has selected the topics for that debate.
Subject to possible changes because of news developments, the topics for the October 19 debate are as follows, not necessarily to be brought up in this order:
Debt and entitlements
Immigration
Economy
Supreme Court
Foreign hot spots
Fitness to be President
