Cognovi Labs: Twitter Analytics Startup Predicts Trump Upset in Real-Time

​Cognovi Labs, an Ohio-based analytics startup that monitors real-time social media sentiment and trends via Twitter, accurately pegged Donald J. Trump and his fellow Republicans as victors in Tuesday night’s election, hours before the results for the Presidency and control of the Senate were finalized.

This comes just a few months after a similarly unexpected Brexit voting result.  In both cases, the emotion and volume data that Cognovi Labs collected and analyzed from the social media platform enabled the technology to predict outcomes that traditional polls missed.

On the morning of the election, Cognovi Labs posted findings going into the day, showing a head-to-head sentiment split of Clinton 50.3% and Trump 49.7%.  This turned out to be remarkably prescient as, at the time of this release, the head-to-head popular vote breakout stood at Clinton 50.1% and Trump 49.9%.

At 1 pm on Tuesday, November 8th 2016, Dr. Sheth, lead inventor of the technology, predicted the votes in Florida going to Trump, saying “Going against the flow (dangerous) at 1pm, #FloridaVote not looking + for #Hillary, Vol, Emotion favoring #Trump, sentiment #Hillary.” This was also noted in his liveblog where he said, “Clinton better has lots of early and absentee votes for her. Today's analysis of social media when limited to professed votes from Florida until 1pm is not looking in her favor. Volume for Trump is high, positive emotion (joy) for Trump is higher, positive sentiment for Clinton is higher but has to be seen in view of lower volume. This will need close monitoring. The challenge in forecasting may come down to estimates for early voting #Election2016.” 

Throughout the day and as Florida closed, Cognovi Labs identified Trump with the advantage going into counting.  At 9:22, pm Dr. Sheth began a series of tweets noting the difficult path for Clinton, posted a map of projected Trump states and finished by characterizing the surprising outcome of the election as “Brexit 2.0.”

Cognovi Labs also accurately forecasted the GOP hold on to power in the Senate. A tweet from @CognoviLabs at 8:30 pm on Tuesday, November 8, 2016 said, “In our Senate analysis we see the Republicans holding on to the majority.” ​

About Cognovi Labs

Cognovi Labs is an Ikove Venture Partners Startup Nursery™ portfolio company and is currently led by CEO James Mainord.  Twitris, the technology behind Cognovi Labs, was developed at Wright State University by LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar Dr. Amit Sheth, professor at Wright State University and Director of Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge Enable Computing (Kno.e.sis). ​

James Mainord​​
​Cognovi Labs CEO
jmainord@cognovilabs.com
937.239.2250
@cognovilabs

Source: Cognovi Labs, LLC