The financial crisis of 2008 caused many a surprise, but perhaps none as unusual as the recent discovery made by John Bollen of Indiana University.
Bollen has analysed messages sent through the website Twitter during that crisis. He expected that the emotional content of these ‘Tweets’ would mirror the market. But he was wrong. The Tweets did not reflect the market; they predicted it by two to three days, and at an accuracy of about 86%.
Social media, like Twitter or Facebook, are easy to dismiss. For some they seem juvenile, for others decadent, for many faddish. But even Twitter’s greatest fans might be surprised to discover that it predicted the chaos of 2008.
