Can you measure the world population’s happiness using Twitter? That’s what researchers at the University of Vermont believed in their three year study they conducted from September 2008 — August 2011.
After organizing 46 billion tweeted words by 63 million Twitter accounts, the researchers concluded that people’s happiness seems to be declining.
They instructed people who use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing machine to assign tweeted words a happiness value. The words were ranked from the most unhappy to the happiest on a scale from one to 10. For example, the word “laughter” scored 8.5 while the word “terrorist” scored 1.3 (Biddle).
Then the researchers averaged the number of happy and unhappy words and plotted their frequency as seen on the graph below. Click to enlarge the image.
The researchers believed that this plot would allow them to calculate a general global mood, which they found dropped slightly. They found that the happiest days were holidays such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. Drops in happiness were found on days involving the spread of the swine flu, the tsunami in Japan and the death of Patrick Swayze (Boyle).
These findings, however, do not necessarily reflect the overall mood of the entire global population. Rather, the data may only reflect the general mood of those who use Twitter, which usually constitutes a younger demographic (Biddle).
By: Katie Ousley, Anxiety In Teens Contributor
Works Cited
Biddle, Sam. “Everyone on Twitter Is Increasingly Depressed.” Gizmodo. 21 Dec 2011. Web. 19 June 2013.
Boyle, Louise. “Is Twitter making us depressed?” Analysis of tweets reveals 63m users are becoming more unhappy.” Daily Mail. 22 Dec 2011. Web. 19 June 2013.