Social Media Posts Predict Unemployment Spikes Two Weeks Early

People who lose their jobs often post about it before they file paperwork. They vent, ask connections for leads, or just announce they’re unemployed. These posts, scattered across millions of social media users, turn out to predict official unemployment claims up to two weeks before government data arrives. Researchers from New York University, the World Bank, and the University of Oxford built an AI model that scans Twitter for job loss disclosures. They trained it on 31.5 million U.S. users...