A method for computing political preference among Twitter followers

• A method for computing political preferences of users on Twitter based on following behavior.
• A method for integrating users’ scores to rate the political preference of the audience for different media outlets and organizations on Twitter.
• An analysis of this method applied to major media outlets, a wide range of government agencies, and think tanks.

There is great interest in understanding media bias and political information seeking preferences. As many media outlets create online personas, we seek to automatically estimate the political preferences of their audience, rather than examining the bias of the media source. In this paper, we present a novel method for computing the political preferences of an organization's Twitter followers. We present an application of this technique to estimate the political preferences of the audiences of U.S. media outlets, government agencies, and interest groups and think tanks. We also discuss how these results may be used and extended.