Social attention spikes precede larger intraday price moves, not directional ones

Instrumetriq Research Note. Using 362,813 coin-sessions from the Instrumetriq Tier 3 archive (204 days, 2025-12-15 to 2026-07-06, 278 crypto assets), we measure whether a surge in social attention on a coin precedes a larger intraday price move. When a coin's count of distinct posting authors rises to at least 6× its own recent baseline, the rate of a large intraday move (a ≥±4% excursion in either direction) is roughly three to four times the normal-attention rate, and holds within every methodology regime and out-of-sample. The additional movement is direction-symmetric — a volatility association, not a directional one. Companion to the sentiment-direction null note. Reproduction code and free weekly samples are mirrored across GitHub, Hugging Face, Kaggle, and Zenodo. Full archive and current-month updates: instrumetriq.com.