CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Twitter are teaming up on a $10 million project to better understand social networks and figure out new ways to benefit from them.

As part of the five-year partnership, Twitter will provide full access to its real-time, public stream of tweets, as well as the archive of every tweet ever posted.

The new Laboratory for Social Machines based at MIT’s Media Lab will focus on the development of new technologies to make sense of patterns across the broad span of public mass media and social media — and not just Twitter.

The goal is not just to understand how people think and use social media but also to understand how networks can be used to increase accountability and transparency and understand public opinion.