[LINK] "Twitter Suggests Scotland Is Going Solo"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg's Mark Gilbert notes a study of Twitter posts suggesting that momentum may be with separatists.

Opinion polls remain inconclusive as to whether Scotland will decide to secede tomorrow, as the final hours tick by before a referendum. Still, an analysis of Twitter messages by academics at Oxford University has shed a little more light, suggesting that the momentum is with those who favor independence.

Karo Moilanen, a visiting academic at the university, has dissected more than 1 million tweets in the past month. The "yes" campaign has generated more than 782,000 missives, compared with 341,000 for those backing the "no" movement. Both camps saw a dive in activity yesterday, though those backing the Scottish nationalists were still twice as active as the unionists[.]

Moreover, Moilanen's software, called TheySay, parses the sentiments in messages using language algorithms. The results suggest those who would go it alone are more upbeat in their tweeting than their unionist opponents[.]

[. . .] The most recent opinion polls show the "no" campaign leading with about 52 percent, compared with 48 percent for the "yes" group when undecided voters are excluded. That makes the vote too close to call given the margins of error involved and the inherent imprecision of opinion polling. So the excitement of those young Twitter users, voting for the first time, may just determine the fates of both Scotland and the U.K.