The Infinite Brief

Professor Bagrow and his team at the universities of Vermont and Adelaide found it was able to predict the content of a person’s tweets using data collected from just eight of their contacts, and to do so as accurately as if they were looking at that person’s own Twitter feed.

The scientists, dealing with a branch of mathematics called information theory, believe they have shown that as long as an individual can be placed within a social network of friends, it is possible to profile them – even if they’re not actually a member of the social media platform.