This is Scientific American's 60-second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin.You can tell a lot about people's general state of mind based on their social media feeds.Are they always tweeting about their biggest peeves or posting pics of particularly cute kitties?Well, 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 parse the data involves correlating words with positive or negative emotions.But when those tallies are compared with phone surveys that assess regional well-being,Jaidka says, they don't paint an accurate picture of the local zeitgeist.To find out why, Jaidka and her colleague Johannes Eichstaedt of Stanford University analyzed billions of tweets from around the United States.
