Social media research, funded by Twitter, will allow the new Laboratory of Social Machines, under the MIT Media Lab, to study patterns of communication on the Internet and potentially lead to more effective social interaction. Over the next five years, $10 million will be spent on the project, headed by Deb Roy, an associate professor at MIT who already spends one day a week serving as Twitter’s chief media scientist.

“There are a lot of people at Twitter who are interesting in leveraging Twitter for social good,” says Roy. “This serves as kind of an outlet for that.”

The idea of sifting through tweets for patterns and insights is hardly new. The company made $70 million in 2013 licensing the use of flow through its servers for research. Commercial and academic insights are reported regularly. Roy’s team is also studying the ways people communicate on open websites like Reddit and Wikipedia, and on traditional news sources.

The lab will be building tools to help monitor online media trends. One major theme the lab will also explore is the tendency of social media to be better at generating negative energy than positive energy. “It’s better at disrupting or stopping things, or having your voice heard,” says Roy. “It’s harder to harness that into sustained change. It’s not like there’s a silver bullet in technology, but there may be tools that can start to get beyond that disruptive potential.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that Roy’s academic work ended up inside Twitter’s walls. Previous research at MIT led him to build a social television analytics company called Bluefin Labs. He ended up working at Twitter when it bought Bluefin last February.

Twitter’s financial commitment is substantial for MIT. The Media Lab’s regular annual operating budget is about $45 million. While this kind of corporate funding for academic research can come with tensions, MIT says the new lab will have complete operational and academic independence.