Researchers: Twitter Can Predict Crime
What and where you tweet says a lot about you. Researchers at the University of Virginia think Twitter can even help predict crime, according to Agence Presse France.
In a paper published by the journal Decision Support Systems, researchers wrote that combining Twitter and criminal data for a specific location could predict 19 of 25 types of crime.
Criminals aren’t about to tweet “OMG, about to rob this dude,’’ but geotagged tweets, combined with historical crime data for an area, could alert police to a potentially dangerous situation, according to the researchers.
From the Agence Presse France report:
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The goal isn’t some sort of “Minority Report’’ pre-crime division, arresting people based on the likelihood they’ll commit a crime. Instead, law enforcement could use data gleaned from Twitter to station officers in potential hot spots, according to the paper:
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(h/t Business Insider)
Scalese can be reached at [email protected] or via Twitter @BertoScalese.
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