Twitter users have had their most miserable year yet

“IT IS DIFFICULT to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else,” lamented Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a German philosopher. Had he been born 200 years later, Schopenhauer might have found what he was looking for on Twitter—but perhaps not in 2020.

For more than a decade, researchers at the University of Vermont have been scraping a random sample of tweets posted on the microblogging site to gauge how happy or sad the world is feeling on any given day. Their tool, dubbed the Hedonometer, has been called the “Dow Jones index of happiness”. It relies on a database of 10,000 frequently used words rated on a scale from 1 (least happy) to 9 (most happy). Every instance of the word “laughter”, for example, receives a score of 8.5 out of 9; “happiness” and “love” rate almost as highly. At the other end of the scale, the words “suicide” and “terrorist” share the lowest score of 1.3. By averaging the “happiness score” of each day’s tweets, the researchers can identify the events that have the greatest impact on public sentiment around the world.

It should be no surprise that global happiness in 2020 was abysmally low. English-language Twitter's average score for the year was just 5.9, the lowest yet (see chart). It started on January 3rd with America’s assassination by drone strike of Qassem Suleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force. As with the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, the Hedonometer swung sharply lower as Twitter posts were filled with negative words such as “died” and “killed”. Sentiment tumbled again on March 11th when the World Health Organisation officially declared the covid-19 outbreak a pandemic. On May 31st, after protesters marched in more than 100 American cities following the police killing of George Floyd, users flooded the social-media platform with words such as “violence”, “shooting” and “thugs” resulting in the saddest day in Twitter’s history: the Hedonometer sank to 5.63.

Although Western news tends to trigger the biggest movements in the Hedonometer’s happiness score, events elsewhere occasionally break through. When Nigerian security forces opened fire on peaceful protesters in Lagos on October 20th, the Hedonometer dropped to 5.78, just above the pre-2020 nadir of 5.75, which was recorded after America’s deadliest mass shooting, in Las Vegas in October 2017.

The mood outside the English-speaking world was no less melancholy (see second chart). The happiness score of French-speaking Twitter users averaged just 5.82 in 2020. The country has suffered one of the most severe outbreaks in the world and endured multiple lockdowns. Still, some countries were relatively cheery. South Korea has weathered the pandemic well, and Korean tweets in 2020 have featured many more happy words than French or indeed English ones have. It helps to have something to celebrate. Korean Twitter sees a huge surge in joyful words on the birthdays of the members of BTS, the world’s most successful K-pop group. And the exuberance of their army of fans is spreading. When BTS scooped a number of music awards on December 6th, English-language Twitter recorded its second-highest happiness score of the year, buoyed by words like “winning” and “congratulations”. Maybe happiness can be found if you know where to look.