From open source intelligence to citizen science, Twitter has not only been a digital public square, but has also allowed researchers to infer attitudes that are difficult to detect through methods from traditional field research.
For example, people’s willingness to pay for policies and services that address climate change has traditionally been measured through surveys of subjective well-being. Twitter sentiment data gives researchers and policymakers another tool for assessing these attitudes in order to take more meaningful action on climate change.
Researchers in public health have found an association between tweeting about HIV and incidence of HIV, and have been able to measure sentiment at the neighbourhood level to assess the overall health of the people in those neighbourhoods.
PLACE AND TIME
Geotagged data from Twitter helps in a variety of fields such as urban land use and disaster resilience. Being able to identify the locations for a set of tweets allows researchers to correlate information in the tweets with times and places – for example, correlating tweets and ZIP codes to identify hot spots of vaccine hesitancy.
Twitter has been invaluable in the field of open source intelligence (OSINT), particularly for tracking down war crimes. OSINT uses crowdsourcing to identify the locations of photos and videos. In Ukraine, human rights investigators have focused on using Twitter and TikTok to search for evidence of abuses.
Open source intelligence has also been helpful for cutting through the fog of war. For example, OSINT analysts were quick to provide evidence that the missile that exploded in Przewodow, Poland near the Ukrainian border on Nov 15 was likely an S-300 antiaircraft missile and unlikely a ballistic or cruise missile fired by Russia.
CREDENTIALLING AND VERIFICATION
Although misinformation has been disseminated far and wide on Twitter, the platform also serves a role as a global verification mechanism.
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