MindVote: When AI Meets the Wild West of Social Media Opinion

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as scalable tools for pilot testing, predicting public opinion distributions before deploying costly surveys. However, the prevailing paradigm for evaluating these models relies on traditional structured surveys—a methodology misaligned with the more realistic scenarios like social media where opinions are rich in digital contexts. By design, surveys strip away the social and cultural context that shapes public opinion, and LLM benchmarks built on this paradigm inherit these critical limitations. To bridge this gap, we introduce MindVote, the first benchmark for public opinion prediction grounded in authentic social media discourse. MindVote is constructed from 3,918 naturalistic polls sourced from Reddit and Weibo, spanning 23 topics and enriched with detailed annotations for platform and topical context. Using this benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 15 LLMs, revealing a critical "survey-based specialization pitfall" where models fine-tuned on traditional surveys underperform their general-purpose counterparts and demonstrating the necessity of context in social media. MindVote provides a robust, ecologically valid framework to move beyond survey-based evaluations and advance the development of social intelligent AI systems.