Twitter, Facebook conversation about Obama’s debate more positive than elsewhere

Seems like the chatter on Twitter and Facebook about Wednesday’s debate was a lot different — as in positive towards President Obama — than it was in other parts of the media playpen.

It was also more negative toward Mitt Romney, according to a study just released by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

This dovetails with our story Friday about how the narrative on social media platforms is increasingly driving the stories around the debates. And here are some Shaky Hand videos that help tell the story about how the campaigns think social media is gaining a dominant influence.

Say the Pewsters:

On both Twitter and Facebook, the conversation was much more critical of Mitt Romney than it was of Barack Obama. And when the criticism of one candidate and praise of another are combined, the conversation on Twitter leaned Obama’s way. On Facebook it was something of a draw.

On Twitter, the study found that “an examination of 5.9 million opinions posted from the beginning of the debate through the next morning finds more of the conversation leaned Obama’s way (35%) than Romney’s (22%). But those who favored Obama tweeted not so much to praise him as to criticize his opponent. Of the entire conversation, 9% praised the president and 26% was critical of Romney. Of those favoring Romney, 7% praised him and 15% criticized Obama.”

On Facebook, it found that “the results were more evenly split. An analysis of 262,008 assertions on public Facebook posts during the same period found that 40% of the discussion leaned toward Obama compared with 36% toward Romney.”

Blogs, however, were “aligned with the sentiment found” ….horrors!…in the mainstream media: “An analysis of 6,313 assertions in a broad sample of public blogs favored Romney by roughly 4 to 1. Fully 45% of that sentiment leaned Romney’s way and 12% toward Obama. Here, almost all of the conversation for Obama was criticizing Romney. Of the conversation going Romney’s way, more of it actually praised his performance (26%) than criticized the president’s (18%).”

Joe Garofoli