Global Happiness Is Declining... At Least On Twitter

Maybe the whole world is becoming depressed. Or maybe Twitter users are just less happy than the average person. Either way, new research shows that happiness is on the decline – at least according to billions of tweets sent over the past 33 months.

A University of Vermont research paper published in the journal PLoS One tracked more than 46 billion words in nearly 4.6 billion tweets sent between September 2008 and September 2011. The researchers were interested in the tone of the tweets – whether they were positive or negative – and used more than 10,000 of the most common English words in their study.