hJun 28, 2017

A paper extolls the great protester-silencing powers of birdsite.
I'm pretty sure that autocratic governments around the world are loving the good news.

Twitter detects riots faster than police, study says
The social media service can pick up on crime more than an hour faster than the police do via reports, according to researchers at Cardiff University.

https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-detects-riots-faster-than-police-reports-says-study/

Show threadWill 🌹🏴Jun 29, 2017
@h in this instance, it appears to be just the idea of scanning public posts. Not sure Masto is any different in this respect
Show threadMichael Sappir
@datatitian @h it's at least marginally different in that Masto doesn't make it as easy to scan all public posts. you could pretty easily scan all public feeds from all instances listed in the big instance list, but that's probably more work (for the computer) than querying one huge network, and there's no way of knowing about *all* instances from one starting point (i.e. some instances could opt not to be listed.)
Jul 2, 2017 at 3:20pmWeb
Show threadAlex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UKJul 2, 2017

@abgd @datatitian @h in 2011 Suffolk Constabulary were actually able to prevent any riots happening in Ipswich as they had already had some level of monitoring of social media use of teens in the area (they rounded the kids up before they caused any trouble and took them home to their parents!).

How this was achieved isn't clear but there is a large BT research centre round here with strong links to govt/public services..