Birdsong might announce the spring – but the Dutch statistics office is using Twitter to measure more worrying signs in society, reports NOS on Friday.

According to the national broadcaster, the CBS service has been gathering all public tweets since 2010 and has now mapped these out to show spikes in anxiety or insecurity.

A graphic from the new programme shows peaks of ‘social tension’ at moments such as terror attacks, the MH17 aircraft disaster and the disruption of Remembrance Day in 2010. The election of Donald Trump in America, according to the CBS, also apparently caused a sense of unrest in the Netherlands.

Now it plans to do this analysis in real time, and ‘then we can foresee rising social tensions,’ a spokesperson told the NOS, suggesting that such information might be of interest to police – although this service has not responded to the suggestion.

Key words

The CBS’s Center for Big Data Statistics is developing the programme, which examines Dutch-language tweets that indicate social tensions, comparing these to the total of all messages on Twitter at the time. Words such as ‘terrorist’, ‘fear’, ‘violence’, ‘police’, ‘help’ and ‘protection’ are triggers, but positive tweets including these words – the CBS says – are omitted.

‘We see clear peaks at logical moments, such as after attacks,’ the spokesperson said in a press release, adding that although it had tried to analyse Facebook posts, this was less suitable as fewer are public and there’s less discussion of news.

‘Social media are ideal to measure feelings in the Netherlands,’ adds the organisation on its website. ‘People share their opinions over social issues, talk about their feelings and discuss how things are going in the Netherlands, from their point of view.’