Social media allows for the easy gathering of large amounts of data generated by the public while communicating with each other.
New research has analysed the mood of Twitter users in the UK and detected various changes in the mood of the public. In particular, the researchers observed a significant increase in negative mood, anger and fear, coinciding with the announcement of spending cuts and last summer's riots together with a possibly calming effect during the royal wedding. The study by academics at the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory is presented at the International Workshop on Social Media Applications in News and Entertainment (SMANE 2012) held in Lyon, France. In this study the researchers focused on measuring the mood, and changes, using standard tools for mood detection, of a large sample of the UK population. A collection of 484 million tweets generated by more than 9.8 million users from the UK were analysed between July 2009 and January 2012, a period marked by economic downturn and some social tensions. The findings present intriguing patterns that can be explained when events and social changes are taken into account. The researchers found that a significant increase in negative mood indicators coincided with the announcement of the cuts to public spending by the government, and that this effect is still lasting.
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