Hedonometer: Average Happiness of Twitter over Time
hedonometer.org
hedonometer.org
Over time Twitter naturally would have accounts with nothing but performative anxiety present, as Twitter (at least for me) is more an antisocial network, not a social network highlighting our more positive nature (Think Instagram, and TikTok for contrast).
I had this thought two days ago—that Twitter is largely a repository of mental health issues on display. The next day I visited a developer's Twitter profile, and it was just bad jokes with a general theme of mental health. I created a new profile recently in order to interact with developers but I will never again enter into this performative aspect of the website.
Instagram may be nothing but vapid voyeurism, but the posts there are generally (fake) messages of "I am enjoying my life, look at it!" My stream's a bunch of travel photos and/or interesting things. Even if it's shallow or attention-seeking, it's a far cry from the flood of hatred and filth that spews from Twitter's fringe.
TikTok's a bit more varied (and feels more akin to reddit, which has a lot of ups and downs), but still doesn't feel as bad as Twitter.
How so?
http://wefeelfine.org/methodology.html
When I did some work on sentiment analysis using tools like Crimson Hexagon, it always felt like the data was skewed since what people post is different from what they say, which itself is different from what they do. Might need to be some kind of corrective filter that includes 'uncounted emotion' as a baseline.
I like that. What's the actual quote?
Edit: it's probably this:
> …the computer is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
Mentioning negative events therefore seems to directly decrease the happiness score, so a conclusion like yours is almost tautological -- when a negative event happens, people talk about it, so the algorithm infers that people are unhappy.
What's more, it's misguiding to say that people talk about things that happen. People talk about some of the things that happen. Media plays a big role in the selection. People also tend to adopt framings. Which is to say that people's happiness does depend on what's being talked about, if we agree that happiness is the positivity of thoughts held.
Some interesting takeaways from my experiment:
- President Obama's tweets became a LOT happier once he left office.
- Donald Trump's tweets were less negative than one might think! I did some digging and found most of the "happy" tweets were made by his social media team--the tweets made by him personally were quite angry.
Critically, the baseline is fairly static, so the extremes in this graph can only be reached by fairly major events that are capable of drowning out the typical everyday tweets.