When I've tried to predict social unrest or market volatility from the news, I've found, than news actually trailing important events and are useless for any sorts of prediction.
> When I've tried to predict social unrest or market volatility from the news, I've found, than news actually trailing important events and are useless for any sorts of prediction.
It might be useful though to be able to distinguish actual social unrest from the astroturf variety.
Luckily, that’s not my application area if these ideas right now. :) But it might indeed fail for some of the same structural regularities!