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Effects of the recession on public mood in the UK

Published: 16 April 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Large scale analysis of social media content allows for real time discovery of macro-scale patterns in public opinion and sentiment. In this paper we analyse a collection of 484 million tweets generated by more than 9.8 million users from the United Kingdom over the past 31 months, a period marked by economic downturn and some social tensions. Our findings, besides corroborating our choice of method for the detection of public mood, also present intriguing patterns that can be explained in terms of events and social changes. On the one hand, the time series we obtain show that periodic events such as Christmas and Halloween evoke similar mood patterns every year. On the other hand, we see that a significant increase in negative mood indicators coincide with the announcement of the cuts to public spending by the government, and that this effect is still lasting. We also detect events such as the riots of summer 2011, as well as a possible calming effect coinciding with the run up to the royal wedding.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WWW '12 Companion: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web
April 2012
1250 pages
ISBN:9781450312301
DOI:10.1145/2187980
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • Univ. de Lyon: Universite de Lyon

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 April 2012

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Author Tags

  1. event detection
  2. mood analysis
  3. sentiment analysis
  4. social media
  5. twitter

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WWW 2012
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  • Univ. de Lyon
WWW 2012: 21st World Wide Web Conference 2012
April 16 - 20, 2012
Lyon, France

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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  • (2024)National unemployment rates and the meaning of work: a cross-level examinationEuropean Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology10.1080/1359432X.2024.232322133:4(474-487)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Multi Feature Extraction and Trend Prediction for Weibo Topic Dissemination NetworkJournal of Signal Processing Systems10.1007/s11265-023-01905-496:2(113-129)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2024
  • (2023)Embedding the Social Value in Algorithmic Innovation and Companies Competitiveness: Evidence from the food-delivery platforms in China2023 IEEE 43rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops (ICDCSW)10.1109/ICDCSW60045.2023.00018(79-84)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2023
  • (2022)Global and Local Trends Affecting the Experience of US and UK Healthcare Professionals during COVID-19: Twitter Text AnalysisInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health10.3390/ijerph1911689519:11(6895)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2022
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  • (2019)Identifying long-term periodic cycles and memories of collective emotion in online social mediaPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.021384314:3(e0213843)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2019
  • (2019)History playground: A tool for discovering temporal trends in massive textual corporaDigital Scholarship in the Humanities10.1093/llc/fqy07735:2(328-341)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2019
  • (2019)Cultural evolution of emotional expression in 50 years of song lyricsEvolutionary Human Sciences10.1017/ehs.2019.111Online publication date: 7-Nov-2019
  • (2018)Examining government-citizen interactions on Twitter using visual and sentiment analysisProceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age10.1145/3209281.3209356(1-10)Online publication date: 30-May-2018
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