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.
Apparently, Twitter has no such analytics services. Wall Street journal reports that the company blocked Dataminr, a company that provides analytics and finds patterns from every tweet posted. Twitter's blocking of the service was reportedly done as the US Secret Service uses Dataminr.
Citing sources familiar with the matter, the WSJ reported that Dataminr executives recently told intelligence agencies that Twitter stopped cooperation of 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 shows that it closely controls its APIs and data it exposes. According to WSJ, Dataminr, which owns a 5% of Twitter shares, was the only service that had access to full real-time network streaming on both current and old tweets. So the US government does not have many close-up alternatives to 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. informationς, και ότι έχει παράσχει έγκαιρες προalerts for ISIS attacks in Libya, as well as for the Brazilian political 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 company's latest transparency report showed that the number of data requests to the US government increased by 65 percent over the last six months of 2015 compared to the same period as 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.