Social sentiment tone shows no detectable lead over short-horizon price direction

Instrumetriq Research Note. Using 364,474 coin-sessions from the Instrumetriq Tier 3 archive (204 days, 2025-12-15 to 2026-07-06, 278 crypto assets), we test whether the tone of social sentiment (bullish vs bearish) leads short-horizon crypto price direction. Across every no-look-ahead horizon up to ~2-8 hours, the Spearman rank correlation between tone and the signed forward return stays within |IC|=0.007 in pooled point estimate, with no full-archive interval reaching |IC|=0.015 - a bounded null with no usable directional lead, subject to a stated negative-tone measurement caveat. Companion to the attention-volatility note. Reproduction code and free weekly samples are mirrored across GitHub, Hugging Face, Kaggle, and Zenodo. Full archive and current-month updates: instrumetriq.com.