Monday, October 2 was the saddest day ever – when considering the Twittersphere.
Researchers have been using a tool called the ‘hedonometer’ to track people’s feelings on Twitter since 2008.
Following Monday’s shooting in Las Vegas – the biggest mass shooting in modern US history which killed 59 people – the hedonometer tracked the saddest levels ever.
Researchers have been using a tool called the ‘hedonometer’ to track people’s feelings on Twitter since 2008. Following Monday’s shooting in Las Vegas – the biggest mass shooting in modern US history which killed 59 people – the hedonometer tracked the saddest levels ever. Pictured are the most frequently used words in Tweets from that day
The hedonometer uses an algorithm that works by randomly sampling 50 million (10 per cent) of all messages posted to Twitter each day – roughly 10 per cent of all messages posted to Twitter every day.
Words in messages written in English are thrown into a large ‘bag’ (containing about 100 million words per day) and the bag is assigned a happiness score based on the average happiness score of the words contained within.
To quantify the happiness of words, the researchers behind hedonometer created a list of the 10,000 most frequently used words from four places: Google Books, New York Times articles, Music Lyrics and Twitter messages.
Then, each of these words was analyzed on a nine point scale of happiness: (1) sad to (9) happy.
For example, words such as ‘laughter’ and ‘happiness’ score the highest, with scores of 8.50 and 8.44, respectively.
The words with the lowest happiness scores are ‘terrorist’ and ‘suicide,’ both scored at 1.30.
The score on an average day is 6 to 6.1, which may be because there are more positive than negative words in the English language.
But on Monday, happiness levels dropped to 5.7 – the lowest they’ve ever been.
The most commonly frequently used words on Twitter on Monday were ‘shooting,’ ‘gun,’ ‘victims,’ ‘terrorist,’ and ‘terrorism.’
Dr Chris Danforth, a mathematician at the University of Vermont who co-founded the tracking tool with his colleague Dr Peter Dodds, told Vox that ‘[Our happiness cycles have] been incredibly regular for eight years until the last year.
Average happiness on Twitter since 2009. Happiness is generally expressed in waves, with lows that tend to follow natural disasters or terrorist attacks – however the election of Donald Trump was also one of the saddest days ever on Twitter
‘Now the signal is jumping down a lot more, and the regular weekly cycle has fallen apart.
‘It’s more of a roller coaster now than it used to be.’
Dr Danforth says that the tool has found that happiness is generally expressed in waves, with lows that tend to follow natural disasters or terrorist attacks – however the election of Donald Trump was also one of the saddest days ever on Twitter.
High scores tend to happen around events such as Christmas and Mother’s day, and other happily viewed occasions.
The tool, however, does exhibit some anomalies.
For example, on the day of Osama Bin Laden’s death, there were low happiness scores.
‘Many people presume this day will be one of clear positivity,’ hedonometer’s website says.
‘While we do see positive words such as ‘celebration’ appearing, the overall language of the day on Twitter reflected that a very negatively viewed character met a very negative end.’
While Twitter users only represent a certain subset of the world’s population, hedonometer claims that the demographics of Twitter are representative, and that the hedonometer’s measure of happiness ‘correlates very well with traditional surveys of well-being.’
In the future, the researchers behind hedonometer plan to include sources other than Twitter, for example Google Trends (what people are searching for), bit.ly (what people are looking at online), and the BBC (what people are reading), which will allow the tool to explore societal trends in different ways.
The team is also building a database of word-based measures for emotions others than happiness and sadness, such as fear, anger and surprise.
Following Monday’s shooting in Las Vegas – the biggest mass shooting in modern US history which killed 59 people – the hedonometer tracked the saddest levels ever on Twitter. Pictured are Elisabeth Apcar (C) and her cousin Dashenka Giraldo, lighting candles at a makeshift memorial for shooting victims at the Las Vegas Strip and Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas, Nevada