Kyoto Institute of Technology has found unusual association of tweets and locations
Train stations are favourite places to post angry posts on the social web, researchers at the Kyoto Institute of Technology (https://www.kit.ac.jp/en) have found. They analysed information about buildings via OpenStreetMap and public geographical databases. In this way, almost two million tweets from people in London and San Francisco were collected.
Even bridges make people angry
Train stations are where anger is most often channelled. Other transport areas where people express their frustration on social media are bridges and bus stops. The researchers suspect the source of aggression to be delays and cancellations of transport services. As for bridges, on the other hand, that remains an open question so far. After all, anger is not the only reason for sending posts into the world at said places. Some also express disgust, many anticipation and a few simple joy.
The team also determined where people are happiest: happy tweets dominate in hotels and restaurants. This may be due to good food and comfortable beds. In addition, the researchers identified specific events where people show high levels of emotion. On New Year’s Eve, people in London and San Francisco were united in this regard. In contrast, at the Women’s March 2017, a protest event following the inauguration of Donald Trump as president, San Francisco showed enormous potential for anger, disgust and sadness.
Disgust with US real estate agents
The researchers chose London and San Francisco for their study because localisations with OpenStreetMap are possible in these cities. Thus, they found that citizens in San Francisco are angriest on Wednesdays, while Londoners are angriest on Tuesdays. Tweets posted on weekends tended to show more positive emotions like joy, compared to more frequently expressed negative emotions like sadness on weekdays. In San Francisco, people were most likely to tweet disgust posts when they were around real estate agents, followed by home improvement stores.
