Social Media Platforms Can Help Predict Disturbing Events Faster Than Police: Study

By running an algorithm of more than 1.6 million tweets related to the London riots that took place in 2011, researchers at Cadriff University have concluded that Twitter and other social media platforms can be used to predict any disruptive events before Of being reported to the police.

In its investigative analysis, the team found that by scanning tweets alone it could have detected problems in Enfield one hour and 23 minutes before police were alerted about it. They say that real-time data, including location, incident time, content, available on these social media platforms acts as “social sensors” to report any incident. “Detecting and automatically categorizing events, particularly small-scale incidents, using transmitted data is a non-trivial task, but would be of great value to public safety organizations like the local police, who need to respond accordingly,” the team said.

However, they still believe that such a system can never replace the traditional police systems used to find dangerous incidents. According to them, the digitization of social media messages can be useful for detecting large-scale incidents, but not minor ones.

“In this research, we show that online social media is becoming the place to report observations of everyday events, including social disorder and criminal grounding,” said study co-author Pete Burnap.

“We will never replace traditional police resources on the ground, but we have shown that this research could increase the existing intelligence gathering and harness new technologies to support more established police methods.”