You can tell a lot about people's general state of mind based on their social media feeds. Are they always tweeting（发微博）about their biggest annoyances or posting pictures of particularly cute kitties? In a similar fashion, researchers are turning to Twitter for clues about the overall happiness of entire geographic communities.
What they're finding is that regional variation in the use of common phrases produces predictions that don't always reflect the local state of well being. But removing from their analyses just three specific terms -- good, love and LOL - greatly improves the accuracy of the methods.
"We're living in a crazy COVID-19 era. And now more than ever, we're using social media to adapt to a new normal and reach out to the friends and family that we can't meet face-to-face. " Kokil Jaidka studies computational linguistics at the National University of Singapore. "But our words aren't useful just to understand what we, as individuals, think and feel. They're also useful clues about the community we live in. "
One of the simpler methods that many scientists use to analyze the data involves correlating words with positive or negative emotions. But when those records are compared with phone surveys that assess regional well-being, Jaidka says, they don't paint an accurate picture of the local zeitgeist（时代精神）.
Being able to get an accurate read on the mood of the population is no laughing matter. "That's particularly important now, in the time of COVID, where we're expecting a mental health crisis and we're already seeing in survey data the largest decrease in subjective well-being in 10 years at least, if not ever. "
To find out why , Jaidka and her team analyzed billions of tweets from around the United States. And they found that among the most frequently used terms on Twitter are LOL, love and good. And they actually throw the analysis off. Why the disconnect?
"Internet language is really a different beast than regular spoken language. We've adapted words from the English vocabulary to mean different things in different situations. " says Jaidka. "Take, for example, LOL. I've tweeted the word LOL to express irony, annoyance and sometimes just pure surprise. When the methods for measuring LOL as a marker of happiness were created in the 1990s, it still meant laughing out loud. "
"There are plenty of terms that are less misleading," says Jaidka. "Our models tell us that words like excited, fun, great, opportunity, interesting, fantastic and those are better words for measuring subjective well-being. "