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A year in tweets: We look back on the last year with data from Twitter

A year in tweets: We look back on the last year with data from Twitter

David Crowther

Yesterday, March 11th, marked exactly one year since the World Health Organization declared the COVID outbreak a "global pandemic". That same day Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they'd been diagnosed with COVID, and the NBA started cancelling games. For many people it was the day the pandemic became real — and it shows in the data from social media platform Twitter.

The chart above plots the data from hedonometer.org, which has been tracking the "average happiness" score of literally billions of tweets since 2008.

Last year March 11th and 12th were among the days when twitter users were most unhappy or angry, second only to May 31st, when thousands of people turned out in protest against police brutality, after the murder of George Floyd. Those protests actually saw more sadness posted on Twitter than during the storming of the US Capitol.

The happier moments, interestingly, are fairly predictable; the big holidays usually see the most cheer, with Christmas Day usually the "happiest" day most years. Check out the full timeline from the last year if it's a slow Friday.

‍How does this work?

‍The basis for the model is the scoring of about 10,000 unique English words, which are graded on a scale from 1-9 (1 being sad, 9 being very happy). Then, a random sample of about 10% of the ~500 million messages sent on Twitter every day is collected, and an average happiness score for that day is calculated for any tweets determined to be written in English.

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