Is Twitter an Echo Chamber? Connecting Online Public Sentiments to Actual Results From the 2019 Philippine Midterm Elections

Social media platforms like Twitter can act as a gateway towards understanding people's perspectives and viewpoints during national-level events such as elections. As such, one can estimate how likely a certain candidate's turnout would be in an election from reading targeted sentiments published online. In this study, we collected tweets during the 2019 Philippine midterm elections for senatorial positions and performed cluster-based analysis via k-means paired with SHAP to understand the winnability of a candidate with respect to associated words linked to them on Twitter. Results show multiple cases where candidates have won despite amassing extremely negative comments online.