Bad weather leads to nasty tweets

Have you come across an annoying person on Twitter? Then it may not even be that person, but the weather. That is the striking result of a study.

7.7 billion tweets analysed

Is it scorching hot or is the rain pouring down from the sky in buckets? Then that is usually not really good for your mood. And of course that applies not only to you but also to other people. At least that’s what a number of researchers found when they analyzed 7.7 billion tweets with location from 190 countries that were entrusted to the blue bird between 2015 and 2021.

Linking emotion to weather data

For this they used a tool that is able to determine the emotion from language use. They linked this to the weather data around the world during that period. They found that both local extreme heat and extreme precipitation negatively affected mood. The number of happy tweets fell sharply and the number of negative tweets skyrocketed.

The strongest effect was found during all record-breaking heat waves in southwestern Canada and the northwestern United States in 2021, when there were 10 times as many negative tweets as during the average heat wave. But that may also have had to do with the heavy forest fires at that time. If your house or your surroundings are in danger of going up in flames, then of course that doesn’t make you very happy.

More grumpy people due to climate change

The researchers, who are very concerned with climate change, think that because more heat waves and heavy rains are expected, that means our future selves will be a lot less cheerful than they are now. But that can of course also be due to these kinds of grumpy investigations.

The research was a joint project between Columbia University and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.