By: Sai Ranganathan, Maddi Cummins, Yunjun Tang, Srinithi Latha (Data Squad)

You can use this application on the Shiny Server: Comparing Political Opinions on Twitter with Real-Life Events

In this project, our goal is to analyze how Twitter affects policy making and popular political opinions in the United States. To narrow down our research, we will focus on three policies: Net Neutrality, Gun Control and Immigration policies in order to see if what is being said on twitter correlates with the popular opinion and the standing decisions in the real world. We will do this by taking in a collection of tweets about the given topic and see the stances that people on twitter are taking on it (yes vs. no). We will then analyze that data, and create visuals so that we can better understand how the twitter world views a certain political topic and compare that with what is the popular decision and where we stand on the issue as a country according to existing legislation.

We have three specific questions:

• How do the Twitter results compare to current political action?
• What is the current trend of the amount of tweets about these issues?
• How do people's attitude diffenrent about these three policies on Twitter in diffenrent five cities?

The format of this final project will be a Shiny app. And we used library ggplot2 in order to create visualizations, such as maps and graphs, regarding the data. We are using the Twitter API called Search Tweets to get data.