Social media networking sites like Twitter and Facebook allow users to connect and broadcast their opinions and ideas around the clock. It has never been so easy to ‘log into’ what friends, family and the rest of the world is saying, and (as many of us know) hours can pass by like minutes as we consume and contribute to the vast social feed. It is unsurprising therefore that we have become increasingly aware of the impact social networking is having on our day to day lives. Earlier in the year Facebook faced criticism after it emerged the site had conducted a secret experiment on nearly 700,000 users, by hiding “a small percentage” of emotional words from peoples’ news feeds to test the effects this had.
Twitter has also had its fair share of negative press, particularly with regards to trolling and cyber bullying. For example, this week’s news articles from Mashable.com are a clear indication of the negativity associated with the networking site:
JetBlue bans Internet celebrity after threatening tweets
EA boss blasts Twitter after it rejects his harassment report
Police investigating racist tweets aimed at Manchester City’s Yaya Touré
The Internet hates that Jamie Dornan won’t do ’50 Shades’ frontal
Lena Dunham in ‘rage spiral’ over suggestion that she abused her sister
Topshop’s skinny mannequin pissed off a lot of people
(The list goes on)
With all the negativity surrounding the site it’s reasonable to assume that Twitter chatter is full of hate and loathing as opposed to optimism and love, right?
But is this really the case? If so, just how much more negativity is there?
We were so intrigued by this question that we conducted our own mini experiment, by tracking six different emotions on Twitter (happiness, love, sadness, disgust, anger and fear) for 1 week to see which emotion is present in the most tweets.
We were surprised to see that both “love” and “happiness” were by far the most common emotions present in the data.
Emotions present in tweets from 23 October to 30 October 2014
Based on this small study it’s reasonable to suggest that Twitter users are far more inclined to express positive emotions than negative on micro-blogging sites. The next question of course is, why?
Professor Catalina Toma from the University of Wisconsin who has recently conducted a study into emotional sharing on social media says, “When experiencing positive events, people preferred to share via texting and Twitter, because both media are easily accessible from smartphones and are nonintrusive in that communication partners don’t have to reply immediately”. However, when it comes to sharing negative evens, “people could justify interrupting their partners and preferred using the telephone, a more intrusive medium”.
I believe it is increasingly important that we understand and openly discuss the negative effect social media can have on our lives and in particular the lives of your people. But it’s also good to know there’s plenty of love and happiness out there too.
❤