Twitter as Mood Ring: We're in a Funk

Hedonometrics: The Study of Happiness

Can Twitter be used to gauge the overall mood of the world? A group of scientists at the University of Vermont has been tracking the overall mood of Twitter for years, and its findings indicate an overall drop in mood over the past year and a half. In order to take the temperature of the tweeting masses, the researchers assigned numeric values to various words.

A group of mathematicians turned to Twitter to gauge global happiness for 2011, and it seems the last 12 months have not been humanity's cheeriest.

The team from the University of Vermont gathered 4.6 billion Twitter messages from Twitter's 33 million users from around the world. Starting in September 2008, the mathematicians, led by Peter Dodds, assigned happiness grades to more than 10,000 common words with the help of volunteers who judged the words on a scale of 1 to 9. So a word such as "laughter" got an 8.5 and "food" had a 7.44 score. A word such as "terrorist" scored 1.3.

When the team plotted the numbers on a graph, the results showed a gradual downward slope for about the past year and half, except for a brief period between January and April 2009. The gloom and doom wasn't year-round, though. Researchers found that during holidays, moods generally increased, particularly on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, when Twitter was trending the happiest. Mondays and Tuesdays are typically bummers.

Similarly, during significant cultural moments, the varying moods were easy to spot. The team's report, "Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network," noted that some of the sharpest declines in happiness were during the 2008 financial bailout, which they said led to a "multi-week depression." The 2009 H1N1 outbreak, natural disasters such as the earthquakes in Japan and Chile, Michael Jackson's death, Germany beating England in the 2010 World Cup and even the ending of "Lost" all caused significant dents in happiness trending.

Plug a few key words into a computer program, attach a rating to those words, skim the last few years of posts within a globally utilized forum, and ca'ching...you can see a snap-shot of the global mood-set for the past year and a half. I am curious as to who the volunteers assigned to it were and how those volunteers were recruited?

I can see this tech being used for much more than just global mood interpretation.

It's no secret to most ATS'ers that Doom and Gloom sell products, if a certain category is showing a trend of interest, it presents a good opportunity to perhaps profit from it by exasperating said D&G. It's no secret that social media is a widely used tool for corporations selling particular products. With this technology, they can easily steer the advertisements of their products based on the current mood of the consumers on a whole.

One can postulate that not only "moods" can be determined via this method of data extraction and comparison but I would think threat levels against the current PTB. Going so far as perhaps being able to narrow down to one particular individual based on their particular word choices.

Interesting how social media may end up being the driving force at how certain aspects of certain things can be manipulated and perhaps dealt with, if they aren't already and haven't already been for sometime that is.

Here is a copy of the actual study which appears to be quite a lengthy read of which I have not read at this venture as I just happened on this article, it is a 9.7 MB pdf file.

Temporal patterns of happiness and information in a global social network: Hedonometrics and Twitter

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I wonder if the same was done on ATS, what the top mood-set would be? I would be willing to wager that "paranoid" would be in the top three. "Pissed" may be a close second. I guess it would all depend on what the keywords were. I wonder if they took sarcasm into account?

Originally posted by UberL33t
One can postulate that not only "moods" can be determined via this method of data extraction and comparison but I would think threat levels against the current PTB. Going so far as perhaps being able to narrow down to one particular individual based on their particular word choices.

Interesting how social media may end up being the driving force at how certain aspects of certain things can be manipulated and perhaps dealt with, if they aren't already and haven't already been for sometime that is.

Well, the wolf is already at the door, my friend.

From total retroactive survalience that reconstructs your every move to organized manipulation of social networks, social media is a hot buzzword in the survalience and intelligence worlds. Some of the tools and services available are quite sophisticated. Meanwhile on the private sector side, social networks themselves are up to some shady stuff.

I opened a twitter account years ago. But I never use it. It's really dumb. You only get like a line or two .. that's it. It's silly. I 'follow' people on twitter ... like Emilio Estevez and the Bronx Zoo snake that got loose .... but that's all it's really good for. And I only go on once every 3 or 4 months ... I just can't get into it.

reply to post by FlyersFan


I as well do not have a Twitter account. As far as Social Networking, ATS is the only one I am really a member of per se. I have accounts on other social sites but very rarely ever use them to any extent.

There is one that I voyeur (for lack of a better term) quite often in which it pulls most of it's feeds from Twitter, as well as most of the other MSM sights. I also have it as an App on my phone. Breaking News. It has a "push" feature that alerts one whenever a new "breaking news" feed is posted.

But ATS is always my go to site as it is.

reply to post by silent thunder


Those are quite some intriguing tactics. I have learned from being on ATS that there is a lot more to how the inner-machine is run in this world than meets the eye. Great links!

Most of you are not going to like this, but that brief elation between Jan and April 09
was Obama's election .We who voted for him thought we had a chance.
Infrastructure, green jobs, oil companies paying taxes, healthcare and
no one going bankrupt from being sick.The draconian Bush admin.
finally gone. Or at least we thought. Because then the right wing scare machine
kicked in paid for by billionaires (afraid of making slightly less billions.)
AM talk radio pumped out the fake commie scare (yet again) and voted in
the one and only tea party . Big thanks to all who voted them in.
Then, the right stated that job one was to make Obama a one term president.
Congress allows nothing to pass.
Joy Drops .
See, on topic.