Researchers Discover That Social Media Posts Can Be Used To Predict Riots, Revolutions, And Even The Weather
Most of us don’t give much thought to what we post on social media, and a lot of what we see on social media is pretty innocuous. However, it only seems that way at first glance. The truth is that what we post online has a frightening potential. According to recent research from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Washington, the things we post on social media could be utilized by software to predict future events.
In a paper that’s just been published on Arxiv, the team of researchers found that social media can be used to “detect and predict offline events”.
Twitter analysis can accurately predict civil unrest, for instance, because people use certain hashtags to discuss issues online before their anger bubbles over into the real world.
The most famous example of this came during the Arab Spring, when clear signs of the impending protests and unrest were found on social networks days before people took to the streets.
A system called EMBERS (Early Model Based Event Recognition using Surrogates) has also yielded “impressive results” not just in “detecting events, but in detecting specific properties of those events”.
It has been used to predict unrest in South America, forecasting events with 80 per cent accuracy in Brazil and a slightly underwhelming 50 per cent in Venezuela.
Another study showed “impressive” results in detecting “civil unrest” linked to the Black Lives Matter group, which formed in America in response to police shootings.
And that’s not all. The researchers found that social media posts could be used to predict the weather, disease outbreaks, future crimes, and the mental health of individual social media users.
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