US Navy to create database of 350 billion social media posts

The United States navy is planning to create a repository of more than 350 billion social media posts from around the world, to research on how people behave online. 

The project team has not specified from which social media platform they are intend to collect the data. 

However, they will only collect the public posts in between 2014 and 2016, from more than 100 countries and in at least 60 different languages. 

The details of the project were revealed in a  tender document from the Naval Postgraduate School for a firm to provide the data.

The deadline of the applications have now closed.

Additional requirements included:

• the posts must come from at least 200 million unique users
• no more than 30% can come from a particular country
• at least 50% must be in a language other than English
• location information must be included in at least 20% of the records

The collected database must not include private messages and users personal information. 

"Social media data allows us for the first time, to measure how colloquial expressions and slang evolve over time, across a diverse array of human societies, so that we can begin to understand how and why communities come to be formed around certain forms of discourse rather than others," T Camber Warren, the project's lead researcher, told Bloomberg.

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