Twitter blocks legitimate tracking channels. With around 500 million tweets every day, it is very difficult for any organization, including sophisticated government agencies, to analyze its valuable information.
This could help to better understand critical events such as terrorist attacks and human emotions on important issues at a given time.
Obviously, Twitter does not have such analysis services. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company blocked Dataminr, a company that provides analytics and identifies patterns from each tweet that was posted. The exclusion of the service from Twitter is reportedly made because US secret services use Dataminr.
Citing sources familiar with the issue, WSJ reported that Dataminr executives recently told secret services that Twitter stopped working with the company.
A senior official confirmed Twitter's move, saying the company "appeared to be concerned about how close the data was to US intelligence."
Twitter appears to be very tightly controlling its APIs and the data it exposes. According to the WSJ, Dataminr, which owns a 5% stake in Twitter, was the only service that had access to the network's full real-time stream of current and past tweets. So the government of the US, it doesn't have many alternatives to closely monitoring the network.
Dataminr is a service used by private businesses in areas such as finance, news, corporate security and crisis management. The company noted that it notified its customers about the Brussels attacks in March 10 minutes before the media did. informations, and that he has provided timely prealerts on ISIS attacks in Libya, as well as on Brazilian politics crisis.
Twitter is an incredibly powerful source of information about what's going on every day and about what's going to happen, so you understand how important it is for government agencies.
According to Mashable the latter report The company's transparency report showed that the number of data requests to the US government increased by 65 percent in the last six months of 2015 compared to the same period in 2014.
The problem with Twitter's decision to stop accessing secret services via Dataminr is that it reduces their ability to seek information about potential risks through legitimate methods.
