‘Positive updates on Facebook spread happiness’
Analysis of over 1bn anonymised status updates among more than 100m Facebook users has shown posting a positive message can be contagious.
Researchers analysed Facebook status updates in the top 100 most populous cities in the US between January 2009 and March 2012, using automated text analysis.
The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, examined posts by people in cities where it was raining — known to increase the number of negative posts and reduce the number of positive ones — and the impact this had on the status updates of people in cities where it was not raining.
To make sure there was no “topic contagion” all weather-related status updates were removed from the analysis.
Each additional positive post generated about 1.75 positive posts amongst friends. Each additional negative post yielded 1.29 more negative posts.
“Our study suggests that people are not just choosing other people like themselves to associate with but actually causing their friends’ emotional expressions to change,” said lead author James Fowler, professor of political science in the School of Medicine at University of California, San Diego.
“We have enough power in this data set to show that emotional expressions spread online and also that positive expressions spread more than negative.”
He said he believed the study probably under estimated how much emotion spreads through digital social media. “It is possible that emotional contagion online is even stronger than we were able to measure,” he said.
“For our analysis, to get away from measuring the effect of the rain itself, we had to exclude the effects of posts on friends who live in the same cities.
“But we have a pretty good sense from other studies that people who live near each other have stronger relationships and influence each other even more. If we could measure those relationships, we would probably find even more contagion.”
The researchers said the findings raised the prospect of “greater spikes” in global emotion in the future with the growth in online communication, causing volatility in all aspects of life from political systems to financial markets. It was possible that social media could be harnessed to create an “epidemic of wellbeing”, they suggested.
“If an emotional change in one person spreads and causes a change in many, then we may be dramatically underestimating the effectiveness of efforts to improve mental and physical health,” Prof Fowler said.
Police flooded Facebook’s headquarters in Northern California to investigate a threat they later found wasn’t credible.
Menlo Park police commander Dave Bertini says Facebook’s campus was locked down on Tuesday night after San Francisco police passed on a report of a threat shortly after 7pm local time.
Bertini says the threat was found to be unsubstantiated and not credible, and would not give further details.
The area was declared safe, and employees were allowed to leave about 8.30pm.
More than 6,000 people work for the social media giant, but it wasn’t clear how many were at the headquarters at that hour.
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