Evaluating Public Discussion of Occupying Wall Street on Twitter: Linking Twitter Streams with Search Quires, Opinion Polls, Media Coverage, and Stock Market Index

To evaluate the public opinion expression of occupying Wall Street on Twitter, this paper aims to investigate time series of tweet stream, search query, media coverage, stock market, and opinion polls. The findings reveals that: first, the dynamic change of total tweet stream, retweets, discussions, and hashtags are parallel; second, tweet stream and search query are strongly correlated, while tweet stream has only weak correlation with media coverage, opinion poll of president job disapprove rate, stock market index; third, tweet stream has significant influence on search query, however, we found no evidence of statistically significant impacts of digital traces on media coverage, stock market, and president job disapproval rate. The results shed light in understanding the role of digital traces in both reflecting the longitudinal opinion intensity and influencing real world indicators of public opinion.