This article is not about a conspiracy theory. Although the aspect of watching the Simpsons daily to instantly predict the future may sound appealing, there may be a more accurate and practical way, particularly with the consumption of 250 million pieces of daily information. Analyzing the influx of global information accessible at any instant second has significant ramifications including insight of our future. I’m talking about the greatest microblogging service known to man: Twitter. Possible market predictions are only a small part of the potential insights our crystal ball provides, and analyzing the combination of global data can give us insights that would have never been possible before.
Our first example came from analyzing half a billion tweets by Scott Golder from the University of Cornell. Fueled by the question “How do our moods and feelings change throughout time?” the findings were fascinating where the most negativity throughout the week suddenly disappears in late Friday afternoons. Not only did sunlight in different seasons affect mood when comparing various countries, but researchers, through the tweets, found that the relative daylight rather than the amount affected positive mood. Although researchers found people were generally in more positive moods during weekends, their cross cultural analysis also gave us insight on how mood patterns vary depending on culture and relative weekly structures. For example, the increase in positive tweets produced on Fridays and Saturdays reflected the Sunday through Thursday work week in the United Arab Emirates.
Not only is this predictable insight possible through direct consumer information, global events may also be correlated with the information received through Twitter. Could Twitter have predicted the revolution in Egypt beginning in 2010? According to Topsy Labs, there was a significant correlation of Tweets mentioning hashtags #yemen, #iran, and #egypt in the time leading up to the massive revolution with actual events. Twitter exemplifies the instant connections and developments of people directly around the world, and a focus on an analysis of this direct representation of information from people around the world may be vital for our global safety.
Interestingly, however, a social media platform like Twitter may seem like another source for the development of misinformation, but how about using it as a tool to combat it instead? According to research from John Hopkins University, the idea of predicting and stopping the spread of diseases with Twitter was analyzed by looking at over two billion Tweets. The idea was to find the effectiveness of Twitter as a source of public health information, and what they found was that it served as an effective source for public services to know the type of misinformation that was out there. For example, despite the fact that antibiotics do not work on the flu, researchers found many users were taking antibiotics to treat the flu, allowing for the potential to guide further educational public health actions.
Here is an example of symptoms and treatments, some quite interesting derived from tweets.
The potentiality of Twitter as an insightful source to predicting global trends and events is applicable in many ways not yet discovered. The inconceivable amount of information from around the world has the possibility to become puzzle pieces that, only when combined, can present to us an image of our future, an ability that we have never had access to before.