Can twitter predict the future

Internet forecasting: Businesses are mining online messages to unearth consumers’ moods—and even make market predictions
ONE day in 2008 an anonymous Twitter user posted a message: “I am certainly not bored. way busy! feel great!” That is all well and good, one might think, but utterly uninteresting to anyone besides the author and, perhaps, a few friends. Not so, according to Johan Bollen, of Indiana University Bloomington, who collected the tweet, along with plenty of others sent that day. All were rated for emotional content. Many proved similarly chirpy, scoring high on confidence, energy and happiness. Indeed, Dr Bollen reckons, on the day the tweet was posted, America's collective mood perked up a notch. When he and his team examined all the data for the autumn and winter of 2008, they found that Twitter users' collective mood swings coincided with national eventsWhat if precognition were real? If it is a genuine phenomenon, and it originates in the unconscious (as many experiments have shown), could the emotion expressed in Twitter tweets tell us something about the future?

To explore this idea, our research team studied the emotional quality of words used in tweets to find out if they provided clues about upcoming events. We analyzed a collective sentiment metric based on Twitter data from 2009 through 2022 to see if future negative events (i.e., terrorist acts, shootings, etc.) could be predicted. Our preliminary analysis, using that metric, suggests that the emotional reactions expressed in tweets during such future events do “leak backward” in time and affect how people feel in the present. Curious to hear more? Join IONS Chief Scientist Dr. Dean Radin on Friday, October 14th for all of the details on this fascinating new project.Trending topics reveal much more than the objects that captivate the hearts, minds, and keyboards of Twitter users around the world. Twitter’s trends is a cultural mirror that reflects the state of attention and intention. And as such, Tweets then offer an MRI that visualizes the minds of consumers and more importantly, serve as a crystal ball that reveals the future of products and services before and soon after they’re released.

For the most part, however, the vast amount of precious insight is widely untapped. Instead, businesses focus on volume and congregation, enticing brands to engage in the conversation rather than truly capturing and analyzing the activity that inherently inspires empathy and ultimately relevance.

I think that’s about to change...Research reveals much more than a state of events; it also unveils demand and intent, and when dissected through additional filters, data can predict what lies ahead.

Hollywood is no stranger to forecasts and predictions. One of the most accurate solutions to date is based on technology that converges the wisdom of the crowds to create predictive markets. The Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) for example, enables consumers to buy and sell virtual shares of movies and stars. As the world’s leading entertainment stock market, motion picture executives now have a real-time ticker to gauge interest, demand, and the prospective of projects.Scientists at HP Labs in Palo Alto may have uncovered another real-time exchange that will empower studios as well as everyday businesses to surface opportunity and probability and that conversational stock market is better known as Twitter.

Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs essentially proved that social data can accurately predict box office revenues. As explained in their own words...

In recent years, social media has become ubiquitous and important for social networking and content sharing. We demonstrate how social media content can be used to predict real-world outcomes. In particular, we use the chatter from Twitter.com to forecast box-office revenues for movies. We show that a simple model built from the rate at which tweets are created about particular topics can outperform market-based predictors. We further demonstrate how sentiments extracted from Twitter can be further utilized to improve the forecasting power of social media.

To provide a glimpse into their work, Asur and Huberman basically calculated the frequency of film titles as they appeared on Twitter, tracking 24 movies and 2.9 million tweets over the course of three months. Films ranged from Avatar to Twilight: New Moon.With priorities including deregulating speech, combating bot traffic and spam accounts, minimizing advertising and fueling the adoption of web3 technologies, Elon Musk's vision for Twitter is bound to disrupt more than just the social media space. Harvey Pitt, head of digital responsibility at humane creative agency Addvert, spells out five predictions for what a Twitter under Musk will look like.Well, he's only gone and done it.

Provided there is no further drama, Elon Musk will be the private owner of Twitter in six months' time when the recently accepted purchase offer is finalized. Very little is certain; in fact, the deal itself still could come crashing down. Assuming it doesn't, however, one thing is certain: he will implement radical change at Twitter.

Aside from seeing the first human Tweet on Mars, we’ve outlined five predictions of what these changes will look like in 2025 and what they mean for users and marketers.Elon Musk's business acumen lies in his ability to identify where humanity's vision for progress and creating products to satisfy those demands. Take Tesla, for example. He spotted what the mass adoption of electric vehicles would take and built the product to match.

Musk’s purchase of Twitter is therefore likely driven by his observation that we're all broadly unsatisfied with social media today — and the potential to profit from this reality.