BizSugar.com › Marketing › Is social media playing with our emotions

We’ve all heard the stories of a rogue Tweet or Facebook status update getting back to our employers in an unflattering way. Not so fun to have your own updates used against you, is it? But what if I were to tell you that our social media updates are also being used as predictive data of our emotional state?

Every day millions of Tweets and Facebook status updates go out, and this is becoming a virtual gold mine for computer scientists and psychologists alike. It’s free, it’s real time, and it’s plentiful.m What are they looking for, you ask? Your political, religious and sexual orientation, even your IQ are all fair game, but perhaps even more disturbing is the vast insight into our emotions these platforms provide.

Twitter is being heralded as a canary of pocket communities. By analyzing the Tweets of pocket communities, scientists can judge the emotional state of the people there with surprising accuracy (without their consent, mind you).