Commentary: What the world will lose in the demise of Twitter

From open source intelligence to citizen science, Twitter is not only a digital public square, but it has also enabled researchers to infer attitudes that are difficult to detect with traditional field research methods.

For example, people’s willingness to pay for policies and services that address climate change has traditionally been measured through subjective well-being surveys. Twitter sentiment data provides another tool for researchers and policy makers to assess these attitudes in order to take more meaningful action on climate change.

Public health researchers found links between HIV tweets and HIV incidence, allowing them to measure sentiment at the local level and assess the overall health of people in the community.

place and time

Geotagged data from Twitter can be useful in many areas, such as urban land use and disaster resilience. The location of a series of tweets can be determined, allowing researchers to associate information within the tweets with time and place. For example, you can associate tweets with zip codes to identify hot spots of vaccine hesitancy.

Twitter has played an invaluable role in the field of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), especially in tracking war crimes. OSINT uses crowdsourcing to locate photos and videos. In Ukraine, human rights investigators focus on using Twitter and TikTok to look for evidence of human rights violations.

Open source intelligence has also helped us navigate the fog of war. For example, OSINT analysts Missile detonated in Przewodow, Poland The attack near the Ukrainian border on November 15 was likely an S-300 surface-to-air missile and less likely a Russian-launched ballistic or cruise missile.

Credentials and verification

Misinformation is widely circulated on Twitter, but the platform also serves as a global verification mechanism.