Can Riots Be Predicted By Social Media?

sciencehabit writes: The broken glass and burned wreckage are still being cleared in the wake of the riots that convulsed Baltimore's streets on 27 April. The final trigger of the unrest was the funeral of a 25-year-old African-American man who had died in police custody, but observers point to many other root causes, from income inequality to racial discrimination. But for a few researchers who are studying Baltimore's unrest, the question is not the ultimate causes of the riot but its mechanism: How do such riots self-organize and spread? One of those researchers, Dan Braha, a social scientist at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been collecting data from Twitter that spans the riot from buildup to aftermath, part of a larger study of social media and social unrest around the world. He spoke to Science about how researchers are helping to predict the riots of the future.

Comments

Re:I certainly hope not

[Chalnoth]

The murder of Freddie Grey wasn't all that unusual an occurrence, sadly. A person has been killed by police in the US approximately once every 8 hours. It's not always easy to see beforehand which egregious breach of civil rights by the police will result in widespread protests.

Also, white people have a strong tendency to riot for no good reason whatsoever (e.g. the 2011 Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver).