Savannah Guyer
Online reputation can make or break a person, and now the same is true for America’s politicians.
A website launched three weeks ago by a team of University of Iowa professors, alongside the UI Ventures and the UI Research Foundation, will focus on public opinion and measure bias in the media.
Padmini Srinivasan, a UIprofessor of computer science and cofounder of LeftRightPolitics.com, said the new website brings together several algorithms she and her partners have worked on over the past years.
“It was a fun idea that became serious soon,” Srinivasan said. “I fully credit Professor [Zubair] Shafiq for having the initiative to push it forward. I also credit the university for giving us GAP funding.”
Shafiq, a UI assistant professor of computer science and co-creator of the website, said he and his group of researchers have done extensive analyses on various social-media sites for the last two years to find out about public opinion on political issues, although more recently, they have worked on defining biases in American politics.
“What is unique about our website is that we are presenting the presidential candidates as they are being presented on social media, such as with Twitter or Facebook,” Shafiq said. “We collect our information from those sites and come up with numbers in real time of how people are feeling about the candidates.”
Along with representing how the public feels about certain social issues and politicians, Shafiq said the website also investigates political biases in articles written about current events or bureaucratic affairs.
The website is doing something never done before, said G.R. Boynton, a UI professor of political science and cofounder of LeftRightPolitics.com.
“There’s no one I know of who’s trying to put information out there about what type of impression the candidates have on the people,” he said. “We believe it’s important to know how the public is feeling, and people might want to know that in order to help guide them in their thinking.”
UI political-science major Sarah Schnuelle said the website is simple and effective because of how easily it permits people to see everything happening in actual time.
“I think the website is really cool and efficient because it allows people to see the presidential candidates at different angles,” Schnuelle said. “It makes it accessible for people to be better educated on political events and politicians because of how they sort all the information out for you.”
Shafiq said the main goal of LeftRightPolitics.com is to enlighten the public with different perspectives on political news stories.
“What we reported in 2014 is that people are more polarized than ever, and we believe this is happening because of the use of online media,” he said. “We are more prone to follow people whom we like and whom we agree with. This isn’t good, because then you are only hearing the facts you want to hear and agree with, and not the other side of it.”
Shafiq said they noticed an abnormal increase in support for presidential candidate and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio just before the Iowa caucuses, which correlates heavily to Rubio’s ending up doing better in the caucuses than most had expected.
“It was something we caught before any other polls possibly could,” Shafiq said. “It was something that was happening in real time.”
The team is in the process of trying to its technologies to other polling agencies, social-media sites, and news outlets because of how inexpensive and convenient the innovations are, Shafiq said.
While presidential candidates are the website’s main focus right now, Shafiq said that after the election, he and the team members would like to see long-term political views incorporated with controversial issues such as health care or immigration into the website.
“We can repurpose the site for other issues, such as discussions on other elections, specific national or international events,” Srinivasan said. “The principles are the same, the framework the same, the data will change, and likely, too, the name of the site as applications change.”