In the 2010 election, the online space was seen as a battleground to be fought over. In future elections it could be used as a method for better understanding the public

Abstract

While journalists speculated about whether the 2010 UK General Election was the country’s ”first Internet election”, semantic polling (using algorithms to read social media data) was under-examined. Nick Anstead and Ben O’Loughlin explore the role of semantic polling in the 2010 election and argue that it will become even more important in the future