Abstract: A method for estimating the impact of an event includes: receiving social media posts, each of the social media posts including content, a timestamp, and a geolocation; grouping the social media posts by geographic region in accordance with the geolocation associated with the social media post and by time window in accordance with the timestamp associated with the social media post; extracting feature vectors from the social media posts, each of the feature vectors corresponding to one group of social media posts; supplying the feature vectors to one or more models of events to generate one or more classifications of the groups of social media posts, each of the models of events corresponding to a different kind of event, and the classifications of the groups indicating the level of impact of the different kinds of events; and operating a device based on the classifications of the groups of social media posts.