Can Twitter Predict The Next Big Protest?

Twitter offers fantastic insight into what’s happening right now, but can it also be used as a crystal ball to see into the future? That’s the question a recent study may have some answers to.

As MIT Technology Review reports, researcher Nathan Kallus of MIT believes he has come up with a method of predicting crowd behavior offline based on tweets.

His research paper Predicting Crowd Behavior with Big Public Data explores the Egyptian coup d’état in 2013 and how protesters used Twitter to coordinate their meetings.