On a more serious tone, there is one area of research that Twitter data is very valuable for: how information and disinformation is created and spread during major news events: wars, catastrophes, uprisings, school shootings etc.
My gut feeling is that today a lot of quality journalism happens outside of the traditional journalistic organisations. The downside is that also a lot of wild speculation and rumours are spread, but it would be valuable to see how good this modern "crowd" journalism is. A skilled research group can use Twitter data and Internet Archive to track down the original sources of information pretty well.
And momentum stock trades. I've always felt a adept programmer who knew how to data mine and worked for Twitter
could make a fortune in the stock market?
On a more serious tone, there is one area of research that Twitter data is very valuable for: how information and disinformation is created and spread during major news events: wars, catastrophes, uprisings, school shootings etc.
My gut feeling is that today a lot of quality journalism happens outside of the traditional journalistic organisations. The downside is that also a lot of wild speculation and rumours are spread, but it would be valuable to see how good this modern "crowd" journalism is. A skilled research group can use Twitter data and Internet Archive to track down the original sources of information pretty well.