You may have a new Twitter follower you didn’t even know about: Uncle Sam…The National Institutes of Health presented a grant of nearly $83,000 of your tax money to the University of California at San Diego to study how to use Twitter for “depression surveillance.” The idea is to help mental health officials monitor levels of depression by creating an algorithm for monitoring Twitter Tweets and determining whether the people sending them are depressed. If they do get tagged as depressed, then someone from the government might interact with them directly, to try to offer help. Personally, even if I weren’t depressed, nothing would depress me faster than learning the federal government was spending my tax money to read my Twitter Tweets and try to figure out my mood. Tell you what, let’s make a deal. You stop spending my tax money on ridiculous studies, and if I ever feel depressed, I’ll let you know by adding a little sad-faced emoticon and “hashtag-depressed” to all my Tweets.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 14:30:01 +0000