6 surprising things social media can predict - The Week

6 surprising things social media can predict - The Week: 6 surprising things social media can predict
The FBI wants to mine social media for data it hopes can predict future terrorist attacks. But that's not the only way to use Facebook and Twitter as crystal balls
posted on February 13, 2012, at 1:39 PM
A new flock of companies is devoted to analyzing social media data ranging from Facebook posts and tweets to Wikipedia edits and web searches with an eye to predicting everything from Oscar winners to terrorist attacks.

A new flock of companies is devoted to analyzing social media data ranging from Facebook posts and tweets to Wikipedia edits and web searches with an eye to predicting everything from Oscar winners to terrorist attacks. Photo: Helen King/Corbis SEE ALL 110 PHOTOS

The FBI, the Pentagon, and U.S. foreign intelligence agencies are asking outside programmers to design software that will let them sift through the billions of Facebook posts, tweets, and the rest of the universe of social media to get a better, real-time fix on what's going on in the world — and what could happen next. But spy shops are hardly the only ones trying to harness the power of social media to predict the future. Here, six ways data miners are trying to turn Facebook and other social networks into digital crystal balls:

1. Predicting terrorist attacks
The FBI and Director of National Intelligence's office are seeking software that will search through the mountains of "publicly available" data available online — Facebook posts, Wikipedia edits, web searchers, tweets, traffic cameras — and fuse it with intelligence data and maps to "beat the news" by predicting events about to happen. "If [you think] that sounds suspiciously like Minority Report, you're not alone," says Andrew Couts in Digital Trends. We applaud anything that helps "stop truly 'bad guys'... who want to blow up a football stadium." But who do the feds consider "bad guys" today? "Hackers like Anonymous? Wikileaks supporters? Occupy Wall Street protesters? Everyone?"

2. Forecasting election winners
Social media has become a powerful, if imperfect, tool for predicting the winner of the presidential primaries and caucuses this election cycle. As the analysis tools improve, that's bad news for pollsters, says Derrick Harris in GigaOm. It's likely that "the thoughts of a few million people speaking freely are more telling than those of a substantially smaller number of people willing to pick up the phone or waste 30 minutes of their day answering questions." On a creepier level, says Keya Dannenbaum in The Huffington Post, "political data companies are buying up scores of commercial data on each of you," to predict how you personally will vote.