Twitter’s saddest weeks ever
Researchers aiming to quantify global happiness on social media have called the period starting on 26 May “the saddest two weeks” on Twitter. Since 2008, a pair of applied mathematicians have been gauging the positivity and negativity of randomly sampled tweets. Their happiness index had been gradually recovering from the bleak beginnings of the coronavirus pandemic, but dropped sharply following the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota late last month. The lowest point, in May, was far below the previous record, hit after a mass shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2017. But sadness can galvanize people into action. “It’s one thing to tell the world ‘this is the saddest week’,” says social scientist Desmond Patton. “But also in the saddest week, you have thousands and thousands of people who are now activated and moving towards equality and social justice.”
Nature | 3 min read
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