This seems to be a bit of too much ado over nothing. This type of projects have been going on for over a decade now (just search for Twitter or Facebook in Google Scholar). Even the government has been involved in financing some of this research (For example: https://www.iarpa.gov/images/press/osi/24_open_source_indica...).

Many interesting things can be done with this kind of data (and it's what originally got me interested in data science https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319140100). That being said, the specific solicitation (https://www.neco.navy.mil/synopsis/detail.aspx?id=537809) doesn't seem particularly exciting or novel. Just an overgrown grad school project to keep the students busy. With some Python experience and patience to collect the data, pretty much anyone can do something similar.

You can find the slides for one of my old (PyData 2015) tutorials on social media mining here: https://www.slideshare.net/bgoncalves/mining-georeferenced-d...