The 'American Idol' Twitter Curse: Can Tweets Predict the Winner?

SPOILERS AHEAD! If you haven't watched "Idol" yet, move along. There's nothing to see here.

For the rest of you, here's in interesting idea: it seems that you can use Twitter to predict the winner of "American Idol." Or, if you want to put it in a more dramatic way, there's a Twitter curse! Did you imagine a music sting when you read that? Good.

It would seem that, according to Mashable, Twitter fairly consistently provides a barometer showing which contestant is going to win. That is to say, the Idol that is tweeted about the most leading up to the elimination night is the one that goes home.

It seems counter-intuitive, but here's the proof, courtesy of an infographic from the Mashable article:

As you can see, there were more tweets about Lauren yesterday around the time that voting opened up. However, a larger percentage of the tweets about Lauren were neutral or negative as compared to the Scotty tweets. Lauren was eliminated in the finale, as announced tonight. It would seem, from these numbers, that people tend to tweet more about the person they don't like than the person they do like.

Of course, this is just one instance...that theory is debunked when you consider that Pia Toscano, who was perhaps the most surprising elimination of the season, received the most tweets on her elimination night and they were mostly positive.

That raises an interesting question: do people really vote for their favorite Idol, or do they vote against the Idol they hate? If viewers had just wanted to see Stephano (who was up for elimination against Pia) go, they might have just chosen any of the other contestants to vote for. That could have spread the votes out just enough for Stephano fans to keep him in.

And here's another interesting question: how much money could you win off of your friends by using the Twitter Curse as an indicator and betting them on who goes home?