Researchers have mined Twitter to analyze the massive amounts of tweets on a variety of topics since its launch eight years ago. Now, Twitter has invested $10 million and turned over its entire inventory of public tweets to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for further research.
MIT's Media Lab is creating a new research group called the Laboratory for Social Machines. The group will have access to Twitter's entire feed of real-time and archived public tweets, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Twitter will spread its $10 million investment over five years. The Laboratory will use the social network's data "to investigate the rapidly changing and intersecting worlds of news, government and collective action" in hopes of explaining how movements, revolutions and responses to major events happen across the globe, according to Twitter.
"With the investment, Twitter is seizing the opportunity to go deeper into research to understand the role Twitter and other platforms play in the way people communicate, the effect that rapid and fluid communication can have and apply those finding to complex societal issues," Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, said in a statement from MIT Media Lab.
The new partnership follows Twitter Data Grants program launched earlier this year. The program received 1,300 applications and chose six institutions to carry out research based on Twitter data. Institutions have already used the data to study epidemiology, natural disaster response and opinions on any and all topics of interest, according to Twitter.
Approximately 500 million messages are tweeted per day and around 200 billion tweets per year, according to Internet Live Stats.
