From Kash Hill:

Facebook is partnering with Politico to give the newspaper insight into the political leanings of its hundreds of millions of readers in real-time. Via Liz Gannes:

[E]very [Facebook] post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.

via Facebook Gives Politico Deep Access to Users’ Political Sentiments – Liz Gannes – Social – AllThingsD.

It’s an automated process — no Facebook or Politico employee will actually be reading your potentially scandalous thoughts about Mitt Romney. Instead, Facebook feeds any political commentary in status messages into a text analysis software program, the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, which determines whether what you said was positive or negative. Politico’s first story using Facebook’s data reveals that Rick Santorum and Ron Paul were the most talked about candidates on Facebook, while Newt Gingrich garnered the most hate.