If you've been on the Internet for more than a day, you probably noticed it's a bit… angry. All the time. On its best days there's a thin layer of snark coating the famed series of tubes. On its worst days, well, the Internet tries to get someone fired for giving a game a 9/10 rating instead of a 10/10 or Anna Gunn has to write a New York Times op-ed about receiving death threats because people hate her Breaking Bad character or a social network identifies the wrong man as a terrorist or…
I could go on.
According to a group of researchers at Beihang University in China, the problem might be intrinsic to the way people interact on the Internet. People are literally making each other angry on a daily basis.
Staring at the monster
As reported in MIT Technology Review, Rui Fan, Jichang Zhao, Yan Chen, and Ke Xu culled data from Weibo—basically China's version of Twitter. Over the course of six months, the team collected approximately 70 million posts from 200,000 users, then filtered the collection using emoticons. The team separated posts into four emotions: joy, sadness, anger, or disgust. Then they charted how much each emotion spread beyond its originator.
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