Described is a system for early detection of events via social media mining. The system receives, as input, social media blog posts comprising textual data. The system processes the social media blog posts through a cascade of filters. The cascade of filters comprises an event term detection filter, a location term detection filter following the event term detection filter, and a future date detection filter following the location term detection filter. A plurality of candidate social media blog posts describing an event of interest on a future date is output to a user for further analysis.