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Which Presidential candidate is your kindred communicator?

By | November 4, 2012, 9:38 PM PST

Do you communicate more like the President or challenger Mitt Romney?

Do you communicate more like the President or challenger Mitt Romney?

The maker of a popular Android smart phone predictive text app is focusing its AI on analyzing how closely tweets resemble either U.S. Presidential candidate. You may communicate more like the candidate that you don’t favor (assuming you like either)!

SwiftKey learns how you type in the context of words being used together. So, it may accurately predicate what you are going to type before you actually type it. The developers behind it applied that intelligence to over 150,000 words from speeches made by President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney.

The result is SwiftKey’s Prez-o-meter, a Web service that will compare tweets to either candidate. It’s just for fun, but has turned up some interesting results. Media firebrand Glenn Beck is 81 percent like the President, and The Daily Show host Jon Stewart’s writing leans toward Mitt Romney. My tweets are 66 percent like the President.

Other examples include:

●      Bill Gates (@Billgates) - Microsoft founder and philanthropist sways 67 percent toward Obama

●      Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) - True to form, Trump is 61 percent Romney

●      Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff) - Surprisingly the liberal editor-in-chief of Huffington Post is 54 percent closer to Romney.

●      Charlie Sheen (@charliesheen) - The President may be relieved that the #winning star of Anger Management sways 73 percent towards him.

●      Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) - The global media mogul, owner of Fox News and The Wall Street Journal swings 51 percent towards Obama.

●      Jack Dorsey (@jack) - The founder of Twitter is 75 percent Obama.

This is of course just for fun, but your word choice does say something about your identity and character. Scientific American interviewed social psychologist James W. Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin about word choice last year, and went into some detail about it. Read more about that here.

(Image credit: therecruiterslounge.com)

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David Worthington

About David Worthington

David Worthington is a contributing editor for SmartPlanet.

David Worthington

David Worthington

Contributing Editor

David Worthington has written for BetaNews, eWeek, PC World, Technologizer and ZDNet. Formerly, he was a senior editor at SD Times. He holds a degree from Temple University. He is based in New York.

Follow him on Twitter.

David Worthington

David Worthington

David does not have financial holdings that would influence how or what he covers. Occasionally he consults for other companies; should David cover a topic in which a client is involved, he will disclose this fact in his writing. His views do not represent those of his employers.

He writes for SmartPlanet and is not an employee of CBS.

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Of course, sounding like Obama would mean, sounding
like his teleprompter, which would in turn mean, sounding like Obama's speech writers.

If one were to analyze Obama's way of speaking, he would sound more like a fifth-grader than an accomplished speaker with many years of training. Obama's politics are also not reflected in his speeches, since, what he says and means and does away from the written speeches, is completely different.

Obama is a poser, and his campaigns and speeches, are only meant to sway people towards him, whereas, the real Obama is quite different, and someone that most of the people in the U.S. don't even understand.
Posted by adornoe
5th Nov
-1 Votes
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So tell me.
How does the system know a person is not parroting something said by their favorite candidate?

Based on the junk I have seen on Twitter, some people could get a 100% match.

That score does not make them kindred spirits. It makes the person a mindless drone repeating what they are told.
Posted by Hates Idiots
5th Nov
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