Analyzing Tweets To Identify Psychopaths

nonprofiteer writes "Researchers presenting at Defcon next week have developed a psychopathy prediction model for Twitter. It analyzes linguistic tells to rate users' levels of narcissism, machiavellianism and other similarities to Patrick Bateman. 'The FBI could use this to flag potential wrongdoers, but I think it's much more compelling for psychologists to use to understand large communities of people,' says Chris Sumner of the Online Privacy Foundation. Some of the Twitter clues: Curse words. Angry responses to other people, including swearing and use of the word "hate." Using the word "we." Using periods. Using filler words such as 'blah' and 'I mean' and 'um.' So, um, yeah."

Comments

There's a rumor going around

[Dunbal]

I hear that if you measure their skulls you can also spot murderers. I will call this science phrenology!

Re:There's a rumor going around

[Charliemopps]

No, this system tries to predict the future by reading posts on twitter. Could a certain percentage of people who commit violent crime share the common trait of psychopathy? Certainly. Do all? No. In fact, a rather large percentage of the population are psychopathic, yet lead normal, non-violent lives. Far more people that are not psychopathic commit crimes than those with psychopathy.

The end result of this research is rather clear: Watch what you say on the internet, the FBI might flag you. And that's a far more dangerous threat than a few psychopaths walking around. If you look at the biggest mass murders in human history, every single one of them was a government official. Think about that for a while.

Re:There's a rumor going around

[ivoras]

Of course, the real insight is Reverse Phrenology! Kicking people in the head to make them better people!

Re:There's a rumor going around

[fatphil]

> Do all? No.

That's actually not the failure that makes this useless. The failure is that the dangerous psychos are such a small minority of the population that even if you throw away 99% (and I'm being generous) of the relatively normals, you're still left with a huge pool of normals with just a few pschos in it. You've not made the problem of actually finding the psychos significantly easier. Now 99.99% of the people who seem suspicious are dangerous rather than 99.9999%.

This is exactly the same flaw as the face scanner tech they were proposing at airports which Bruce Schneier et al. ripped to pieces when it was first proposed.

Re:There's a rumor going around

[AngryDeuce]

But how many people have an online persona that is vastly different than they're real life one? I have friends that act like they're Che Guevara on their social media postings that, in real life, will bitch and cry and complain for an hour if the person at Starbucks takes too long to prepare their non-fat mochaccinolatte, and don't even get me started on all the people that bitch and complain about "freeloaders" and "people living on the government teat" that I know for a fact are collecting government services themselves or have benefited from them in the past....that's another particularly LOL-worthy demographic these days. And then, of course, there's the "I'm ME and I don't care if anyone likes my opinions or not!" posts I used to see all the time, written by people that are, without a hint of irony, obviously searching for positive reinforcement from their social group.

The number of people I know that are actually 'themselves' on the internet, and not some idealized version of themselves that they invented to be popular, is quite slim. I don't bother with social media anymore because I got tired of dealing with cartoon characters and hypocrites. If people actually had to be themselves on the internet, warts and all, I bet the number of social media junkies out there would plummet overnight...

For those reasons, I fail to see the value in this...

Re:There's a rumor going around

[Maxo-Texas]

I've been using a lot of voice recognition to IM lately.

SO I called someone and got voice mail.. and I said...

"Okay, I got your call and I'll see you later today PERIOD".

I was face slapping as soon as i hung up.

Oh and for the benefit of NSA and twitter type scanners...

I don't know what this shit is. Fuck that. I HATE it when they scan my posts. Period.
I mean blah blah blah, yada, yada. I mean, I don't give a flying fuck, um, what they think.

Thanks--- I was, ah, feeling psychopathic, and um, didn't want to put that in a separate post.

Re:There's a rumor going around

[bill_mcgonigle]

Could a certain percentage of people who commit violent crime share the common trait of psychopathy? Certainly. Do all?

Right. There are psychopaths who are perfectly fine and functional members of society. People often regard them as 'a bit off', but there is more to the psychology of a dangerous psychopath than just being a psychopath.

Check out this BBC Documentary about the neuropsychology of it. The documentary turns out more interesting than would be initially expected (not going to give it away).

That said, when designer babies are feasible, I doubt anybody is going to consciously select for psychopathy. Well, outside of the dystopian scifi realms anyway.

Really?

[WrongSizeGlass]

The ability to predict psychopaths in under 140 characters? What have all these mental health professionals been doing? All these face-to-face interviews, "sessions" and observations. Maybe if they submitted their reports in only 140 characters they would have figured all this out a long time ago. /sarcasm

Re:Really?

[reub2000]

Probably is bullshit. The twitter responses where compared to a survey. In other words they calibrated their instrument by simply asking people if they're a psychopath. Lets see, one of the most well known trait of psychopaths is their tendency to lie.

Re:Really?

[WrongSizeGlass]

Lets see, one of the most well known trait of psychopaths is their tendency to lie.

Is that true ... or are you just a psychopath?

Analyzing myself

[KiloByte]

> Curse words.
Hardly any, but mostly due to many years on a MUD with strict rules. Abusing "damn" and so on, though.

> Angry responses to other people
Hell yeah.

> including swearing and use of the word "hate."
Got a bigger vocabulary, but yeah.

> Using the word "we."
Check, to a big extent.

> Using periods.
You mean, so those with no punctuation are not morons but normal people? Blah. Check.

> Using filler words such as 'blah'
See above.

> and 'I mean'
Check.

>and 'um.'
"hrm", "hmm" and "ghrmblah" (see also two paragraphs above)

So, you mean, is there any hope for me?

Re:Analyzing myself

[WrongSizeGlass]

So, you mean, is there any hope for me?

Sure there is. First, you'll seek twitter therapy and twitter assimilation resistance resistance. If that succeeds your tweets will be indistinguishable from 99% of the population (and most of your followers will finally be able to understand them).

If your TT&TARR fails you'll have to go to twitter court (most trials are very short) or simply go to twitter confessions and throw yourself on the mercy of 12 randomly selected twitter addicts. Once you're sentenced to twitter prison (where all you say and read are tweets) you'll be able to start paying your debt to the twitterverse. When the time comes for your parole review they'll analyze your tweets during your sentence to determine if you're ready for early tweetlease or if you need to try harder.

So yes, there is hope for you ... though not much hope for society at large if we're making DSM-V quality diagnoses based on twitter (unless we're determining that those who use twitter really have too much time on their hands).

Re:Using Periods?

[cheekyjohnson]

What are you, some sort of psychopath? Flag him!