Social Media Predicted the 2008 Presidential Election

On March 19, 2008, before the candidates were nominated, Mike Elgan wrote a column entitled “Has Digg Already Picked the President?” suggesting that social networks might be the best predictor of the outcome of the 2008 presidential election.  He was right:

“At the time, I conducted an analysis that varied from site to site, and included Digg, MySpace and Facebook, to see which of the candidates the social sites preferred. I also suggested that if social sites ended up accurately predicting who would win, they might be taken seriously by future pundits when guesstimating who is likely to be elected in the future. Back then, as you can read in my article, SOCIAL SITES PREDICTED A LANDSLIDE BY OBAMA.”

See Also: Social media’s first big battle