Which was the saddest day of them all? According to the Computational Story Lab of the University of Vermont, it was Sunday, May 31. That day was not only the saddest day of 2020 so far, it was also the saddest day recorded by the lab in the last 13 years. Or at least, the saddest day on Twitter.
The researchers call it the Hedonometer. It is the invention of Chris Danforth and his partner Peter Dodds, both mathematicians and computer scientists and the co-directors of the lab. The Hedonometer has been up and running for more than a decade now, measuring word choices across millions of tweets, every day, the world over, to come up with a moving measure of well-being.
In 2015, the main finding to emerge was our tendency toward relentless positivity on social media. “(That was) One of the happiest years on Twitter, at least for English,” Danforth said recently with a note of rue. That result now seems an artifact from an ancient era. “Since then it has been a long decline.”
Since 2008, the Hedonometer has gathered a random 10 per cent of all public tweets, every day, across a dozen languages. The tool then looks for words that have been ranked for their happy or sad connotation, counts them, and calculates a kind of national happiness average based on which words are dominating the discourse.
On May 31, the most commonly used words on English language Twitter included “terrorist,” “violence” and “racist”. This was about a week after George Floyd was killed, near the start of the protests that would last all summer.
©2020 The New York Times News Service
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