Politico teams with Facebook to report on conversation about presidential candidates

Politico | Facebook
The two companies will analyze the volume and sentiment of discussions about presidential candidates on the social network. Facebook says its data analysis team “will compile mentions of the candidates in U.S. users’ posts and comments,” then “assess positive and negative sentiments expressed about them” and turn the data over to Politico for exclusive analysis. The first report was posted today. They’ll also do survey of voting-age Facebook users in South Carolina, similar to what NBC News did with Facebook in Iowa and New Hampshire. || Related: Al Shaw skeptically tweets: “It’s not journalism if you let a source do the analysis. Facebook puts stuff through a black box, and out comes news!” || Earlier: News organizations embrace social data in 2012 election coverage (Poynter) | Facebook users are more politically active (Poynter) | Poynter’s 2012 campaign reporting coverage