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Vegas shooting was 'Twitter's saddest day'

A tool that measures social media sentiment suggests the day after the mass shooting in Las Vegas was the saddest day ever recorded on Twitter.

Flowers and candles at a makeshift memorial in Las Vegas
The day after the Las Vegas massacre was Twitter's saddest day, a sentiment tool suggests. (AAP)

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Source: AAP


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The day after the mass shooting in Las Vegas was the saddest day ever recorded on Twitter, according to Hedonometer, a tool that measures sentiment on social media platforms.

The barometer, which measures the happiness of Twitter users based on their posts, showed an average happiness level of 5.77 on Monday after the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history occurred at a country music festival, killing at least 59 people dead and more than 500 injured.

The previous record low was 5.84 on the day of another mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, that killed at least 49 people and injured more than 50 last year.

The third-saddest recorded day on Twitter was November 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump was elected US president, according to Hedonometer.

The barometer on that day was 5.87.

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The happiest recorded day on Twitter was on Christmas day of 2008, when the day's score was 6.36.

The tool has been tracking Twitter sentiment since 2008.

Hedonometer was invented by Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, a mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Vermont's Advanced Computing Center.

It gathers sentences that start with "I feel" or "I am feeling" and generates a happiness score for the text.

Each sentence is then given a happiness score from one to nine.


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