What spreads more easily on the internet — joy, sadness, anger or disgust? That was the question a team of researchers at China’s Beihang University set out to answer.
After studying 70 million posts on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, the team discovered that angry tweets were far more likely to get retweeted by others. It might be simply because it is harder to ignore, the 2013 study concluded.
In a paper written for The Aspen Institute Prague, Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology, wrote: “Mediated exchanges often shape and reinforce people’s status and identity. Consequently what happens to people through their online interactions really matters to the way that people perceive themselves offline.”
Another study done by Pew Research showed just how comfortable young users were in participating in online cultures by looking at the amount of personal information they published online.
“Youth are sharing more personal information on their profiles than in the past. They choose privacy settings for Facebook, but share with large networks of friends. Most teen social media users say they aren’t very concerned about third-party access to their data,” the study concluded.
