Twitter’s 140 character limit can be perfect for sending out short bursts of information, but is it also perfect for helping us gauge the public mood?
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Researchers at the University of Bristol in the U.K. conducted a study to test this hypothesis. From July 2009 to January 2012, they analyzed 484 million tweets generated by nearly 20 million users. They found that the microblogging network did indeed match up with British public opinion.
The researchers found a significant increase in negativity, anger and fear around two events in particular — October 2010, which coincides with the government’s announcement of public spending cuts, and last summer, when riots rocked the streets of London and other U.K. cities.
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Of course, public opinion changes — and the researchers found a relative calm in the tweets during last year’s royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton, which was celebrated with great fanfare in the U.K. and made global news.
“While we leave the interpretation of our findings to social and political scientists, we observed how the period preceding the royal wedding seems to be marked by a lowered incidence of anger and fear, which starts rising soon after that,” said Professor of Artificial Intelligence Nello Cristianini. “Of course, other events also happened in early May 2011, so they may also be responsible for that increase.”
The researchers also acknowledged the limitations in their research. To analyze social media content, they used text mining technologies, which, although can be applied to vast amounts of data, are less accurate than assessments by humans.
Also, a Twitter-based study is clearly biased toward Twitter users — and not everyone uses Twitter. Regardless, these findings do make some sense. People use Twitter to post all sorts of things, from news to opinions — and yes, their feelings.
And if you’re interested in what people are loving, hating, thinking, believing, feeling or wishing right now, check out the real-time results coming out of Twistori.
Do you think we’ll continue to find correlations between Twitter and the public mood? Let us know in the comments.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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