Social networks, combined with data analysis software, satisfy a human passion to predict the future.
According to a new study titled “Predicitng Crowd Behavior with Big Public Data,” published by MIT researcher Nathan Kallus, it is possible to predict protests and social unrest with the help of Twitter.
The researcher analyzed more than 300,000 messages in 7 different languages, which led him to the conclusion that the unrest that occurred in Egypt in 2013 was predictable.
However, his study has met with considerable backlash, as the prediction was made after the unrest had occurred, so many of the data sources used already referred to it. In general, techit writes, there has been a lot of research recently in various directions of prediction using social media data sources.
Twitter recently officially launched a data sharing program for academic research. However, the reliability of the predictions has not yet been scientifically verified.
