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Facebook, CNN election insights show lots of Romney chatter

The project, which aims to provide presidential horse-race insights via Facebook postings about the candidates, launches today.

Donna Tam Staff Writer / News
Donna Tam covers Amazon and other fun stuff for CNET News. She is a San Francisco native who enjoys feasting, merrymaking, checking her Gmail and reading her Kindle.
Donna Tam
Screenshot by Donna Tam/CNET

Facebook and CNN launched their election "real-time" insights feature today to show how much presidential candidates are talked about on the world's largest social network.

The insights show that most of the country's Facebook users are currently talking about presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, which makes sense since the Republican National Convention kicks off today.

CNN has the information are broken down by state, age ranges and gender.

This is a continuation of a partnership between Facebook and CNN announced earlier this year. The two companies paired up to introduce a "I'm Voting" app for Facebook.

This isn't the first time Facebook has given access to its insights for the elections -- the company also partnered with Politico earlier this year to let journalists mine its data for voter sentiments.

These partnerships show social media's rising importance in elections. Twitter started a partnership with analytics company Topsy to produce voter sentiment data -- including positive and negative mentions -- with USA Today highlighting the index in its publication.