The purpose of social media is to connect us to our friends and acquaintances. This means that the content we see mostly comes from people who we agree with, creating an echo chamber in which groupthink is perpetuated and dissenting opinions are drowned out. By far the most common way that people with differing opinions interact on social media is through comment flame wars.
Our solution to this problem was to create a tool that analyzes tweets for sentiment, assigns colors to them, and displays the colors on a map based on where the tweet originated. The user inputs a keyword and a time frame, and gets a map of the world colored by the emotions of the people tweeting about it. The map is interactive; the user can zoom in on a certain area and click on the differently colored dots to see the tweets associated with them. This provides a way for the user to access differing viewpoints all around the world. SentiMap makes empathy more accessible, by giving all viewpoints equal weight and exposure for all people.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.