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Twitter Detects Riots Faster Than Police, Study Says (cnet.com)
A new study by Cardiff University has determined that Twitter can be used to identify dangerous situations up to an hour faster than police reports. From a report: Researchers at Cardiff analyzed 1.6 million tweets relevant to the 2011 London riots. In the town of Enfield, police received reports of disorder an hour and 23 minutes after computer systems could have picked up the same information from Twitter, according to the study. "In this research, we show that online social media are becoming the go-to place to report observations of everyday occurrences -- including social disorder and terrestrial criminal activity," said co-author of the study Pete Burnap.
But totally useless for orbital or extraterrestrial criminal activity.
Yet again our Slashdot overlords subject us to clickbait and misleading titles.
This should read, "Twitter Theoretically Could Detect Riots Faster Than Police."
In other news, Jennifer Lawrence Could Theoretically Show Up At My Door And Demand Sex.
Monitor Twitter and find the riot faster...
It will be all fun and games until somebody figures out how to spoof a riot by spamming Twitter... The police show up and volia! A new way to "SWAT" someone...
BTW.... For most riots... Who doesn't know in ADVANCE where they are going to be? We act like they are just events that happen at random times and places. You may not know the exact block the violence will break out, but it's usually pretty obvious when the risk of such behavior is high and where it's likely to happen based on the current events driving the whole thing.
Riots, like fire, have some pretty easily identified prerequisites.... 1. Groups of people gathering for some reason... 2. Strong emotions around the reason... 3. Strong rhetoric associated with the reason, encouraging people to feel hopeless about affecting some kind of change 4. A faction of people involved who don't mind violence.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If law enforcement doesn't already have back-end access to this data, they will soon. I imagine the information gets even more detailed and accurate once you aggregate data from all the tracking companies (Apple, Facebook, Google) together. Not to mention the NSA's own databases.
You could easily imagine a system being developed to track not just currently-happening riots, but the likelihood a riot will happen in the near future. Which area it's likely to happen in. Who is likely to participate.
Of course, charging people in open court with pre-crime probably won't fly. And a predictive system like this is always going to be a game of probabilities, it might not have the "resolution" to predict individual actions. What you can do is systematically target groups of people for surveillance or manipulation. Not that we aren't already doing that, but now it's more effective. And who the data tells us to watch might end up being somebody different than they watch today.