LONDON -- It's true. Research has proven it. Harry Styles is THE happiest celebrity on Twitter. Fact.
An investigation carried out by Adoreboard, a semantics analytics firm at Queens University Belfast, looked at the emotions displayed in the tweets of the top 100 celebrities on Twitter to determine which of the social media site's most-followed were feeling consistently great.
And, it seems, Harry Styles came out on top.
Steve Martin plays banjo.— Harry Styles. (@Harry_Styles) May 2, 2015
From January 1 to August 26 of this year, everyone from Miley Cyrus to Brazilian TV presenter Marcos Mion (we know, who?) had their online moods monitored for a range of emotions, the strength of these emotions -- a.k.a. activation -- and their character, or valence, which basically assesses positivity and negativity.
Sound complicated? It is, so the people at Adoreboard generated Toneapi, software that can recognise emotions, then extract them from any text content.
In Toneapi, 24 emotions -- ecstasy, vigilance, rage, admiration, joy, anticipation, anger, trust, acceptance, annoyance, interest, serenity, pensiveness, fear, amazement, surprise, distraction, apprehension, sadness, grief, boredom, disgust, loathing and terror -- are linked to a variety of phrases and concepts that can be read in text.
Text, in this case, is tweets.
"This bucket hat might be the best purchase we've made in years."— Harry Styles. (@Harry_Styles) January 17, 2015
According to Dr. Fergal Monaghan, Adoreboard's chief technology officer, Toneapi "gives a breakdown into what emotions are driving the [text's] tone. Negative emotions could be driven by anger, just as equally as disgust, whereas positive emotions could be caused by trust, joy and ecstasy."
So, how do Harry Styles' tweets prove that he's the happiest celeb on Twitter?
A quick analysis of Harry's most used phrase, "all the love," returns a positivity rating of 94, suggesting that adding it to the end of any tweet can increase Harry's perceived online happiness by a considerable amount.
And that amounts to a lot, seeing as Harry does have all of the love.
Thank you to everyone at the show in Chicago last night. You were very nice. Thanks for having us. All the love— Harry Styles. (@Harry_Styles) August 24, 2015
Huge day for America.. Happy to see the news. All the love— Harry Styles. (@Harry_Styles) June 26, 2015
Cardiff, you were lovely. Thank you for having us. You were a perfect crowd tonight. All the love— Harry Styles. (@Harry_Styles) June 6, 2015
All the love as always. H— Harry Styles. (@Harry_Styles) March 26, 2015
Swoon.
But even if Harry is the happiest celeb on Twitter, his positivity and generally upbeat attitude got us thinking. What about the other celebrities on that top 100 list? What about the other 1D members?
What about ... Zayn?
Exhibit A.
Oh and I write my own shit too dickhead— zayn (@zaynmalik) August 17, 2015
It doesn't take a genius to work out that Zayn's online persona is the polar opposite of his happy chappy ex-bandmate, but Toneapi's analysis goes ahead and proves this for us anyway. The above tweet scores -64 on the positivity scale whilst featuring the emotions loathing, grief and ANGER. Ooo, burn.
However, we also ran THIS tweet through Toneapi to see just how much 'love' -- but not all the love -- can change the tone of an otherwise negative piece of content.
I'm 22 years old... I love a girl named Perrie Edwards. And there's a lot of jealous fucks in this world I'm sorry for what it looks like x— zayn (@zaynmalik) March 18, 2015
The screen grab below shows the positive/negative weighting that 'love' and 'fuck' have in the context of Zayn's tweet, with the two pretty much balancing one another out.
For a tweet that shows Zayn both hating the world and repenting his mistakes, Toneapi generates a score of 22 which, although only just, suggests he is feeling 'mostly positive' rather than the down in the dumps he clearly was.
Which brings us to the conclusion, will robots ever rule the world?
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Never.