Social media site puts tweets up for sale

March 23, 2015 2:55 PM

Twitter is reportedly looking at ways to make money by selling people's tweets to other companies known as 'data miners', who could use the content in the tweets to personalise services from advertisers and marketers online, as well as in the real world.

Twitter’s data strategy chief Chris Moody

In an interview with The Guardian, Twitter’s data strategy chief Chris Moody said the data, people's tweets, could also be used by police to gauge the mood of a football crowd, for example, a grandparent travelling on a plane to see their newborn grandson, the airline would know of their impending trip from their tweets and when they arrive they would greet the user by name.

Twitter's boss recently admitted the social network 'sucks' at dealing with trolls and now the site is making good on its promise to clamp down on these abusive accounts.

Reports claim the site will start banning users who violate its rules by tracking email addresses and phone numbers.

It also recently added new tools to make it easier for users to report abuse and send these reports to law enforcement.

'You bring your data to us and we will ensure that your customers, if they exist on Twitter - we can provide advertisements to them,' explained the 48-year-old chief, 'twitter gives this fascinating ability to understand people in context like we’ve never been able to do before.'

He stressed that this would be done anonymously and no private information is shared, plus, unless tweets are protected, they can be searched for and viewed easily already.

As a result there are firms that have developed their own mining software to extract information from tweets.