What Social Media Communicates about the Well-being of Society
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What social media communicates about the world's well-being
Social media may seem like a jumbled sea of smiley faces, selfies and status updates, but when scientists cast their nets, they pull up a haul of data that brings empirical order to the chaos.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and other institutions are finding that the well-being of a community can be determined through the collected posts of its individuals. And the information derived from the data has practical applications across a broad range of disciplines, from marketing to medicine to national security.
As people are more and more migrating toward social media for their social lives, , said Johannes Eichstaedt, a doctoral student in the department of psychology at Penn and a founding research scientist of the World Well-Being Project, which is pioneering techniques for using language in social media to measure well-being.
Eichstaedt discussed his work recently on the Knowledge@Wharton radio show on SiriusXM channel 111. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)
The Power of Words
Eichstaedt and his colleagues have found that words, both positive and negative, are strong indicators of personality. By using algorithms to sift through messages in the milieu of social media, scientists find patterns that begin to emerge.
Social media increasingly becomes the platform for researchers to understand social trends, to understand psychological trends and to understand public health threats.
First, the researchers needed to harness the data. Their sample set came from 100,000 Facebook users who gave permission to be participants in the study. Once they agreed, the users were de-identified and their posts collected through an app. Then, they were given a standard personality survey. The scientists also analyzed Twitter by volume, focusing on the content in one billion tweets, rather than individual users.
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What Social Media Communicates about the Well-being of Society