The saddest day of 2017 (according to the Hedonometer)

The Hedonometer is a cool project that tracks the happiness of the Twitterverse over time, using mechanical Turk-derived "happiness scores" for each word.  So far, last Saturday was the saddest day of 2017, and the single day view of August 12 is perfect for showing how it currently works and where future development is needed.

That Saturday was sadder than the previous seven days because of a greatly increased incidence of "negative" words like hate, violence, and terrorism, with no counterbalancing increase of "positive" words (or decrease of "negative" words) until we hit the word white.

This is where things get interesting, because out of context, white is considered a "positive" word, but in the context of the events in Charlottesville, white was likely a part of phrases that would definitely be negative.  The Hedonometer team is aware of this, and in the frequently asked questions on the About page, note the following:

“How will you deal with context?”
We are currently developing a principled method to identify relevant phrases, for example to deal with the multitude of both positive and negative uses of profanity. We expect to be scoring phrases instead of words, where appropriate, in the near future.