A method for computing political preference among Twitter followers

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. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.