Abstract
Having accounts on several social media platforms and spending a large part of their free time on those networks creates a strong social impact on the individual user. This effect can be beneficial regarding learning, inclusion or socialization but also creates space for negative symptoms like sleep deprivation, anxiety and depression. An automated approach to investigate the development of social media users’ emotions over time was used in this study, allowing to collect information about a larger group of social media users on Twitter. It investigates if the emotions of users or groups of users become more negative over time, as suggested by other studies. The prevalent expressed emotions on twitter were happiness and surprise. From 2015 to 2019, happiness values remained consistent, while an increase in anger, disgust, and fear could be verified for all user groups. It is noticeable that twitter users with the least amount of followers (<25%) expressed anger and fear most strongly. In the future the analysis results in this paper could be used to create services or communities to help young adults with tendencies towards anger, fear, or sadness.
https://ror.org/00txhpa83 
