Twitter is to award the Massachusetts Institute of Technology $10m (£6.2m) and grant them access to all public tweets ever made to study how people communicate on social networks.

The project at MIT, called the Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM) will research patterns of online communication through social media, with researchers planning to build data visuals and develop mobile apps and other tools based on what they learn.

Among the projects plans is looking into why social networks seem a lot better at generating negative reactions to events than positive ones, with the view to developing tools that will make online civic action more effective.

Twitter has shared data with third-party researchers in the past – in February it set up a Data Grants program which enabled scientists to access information for free, while before that, many studies found their own ways to access mass amounts of tweets for various reasons, such as tracking reactions to earthquakes or monitoring public opinion on different restaurants.