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The Most Influential Emotion on the Internet: Anger

The Most Influential Emotion on the Internet: Anger

If you’ve ever been dragged into a political debate on Facebook, a theological squabble in the comments of an online article or simply witnessed friends venting on Twitter, than the results of recent research may be no surprise: Anger is the Internet’s most powerful emotion. Researchers at China’s Beihang University analyzed more than 70 million interactions (on the Twitter-like site Weibo), and categorized them according to emotion. They found that anger was the most likely to spread from user to user. The hostile ripple effect was so powerful, that a rage-filled social media post could cause other angry reactions three degrees of separation from the initial post. As this story explains, “one angry post could negatively influence a follower of a follower of a follower” …

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