The Most Negative Places On Earth (According To Emojis)

Where are the most negative places on earth?

Which state is most downbeat?

Where will you find the saddest population?

Historically there’s been no easy way to answer these questions.

However, Brandwatch’s new emoji analysis functionality allowed us to finally shed some light on these very important questions.

The data

We analyzed 6 billion tweets published on Twitter over the last two years. Every one of these tweets contained at least one emoji.

Then, we segmented these tweets into two buckets using Unicode’s official classifications: 

1. Positive (e.g. ? ? ? ? see full list here)
2. Negative (e.g ? ? ? ? see full list here)

Next, we broke down the data by location and analyzed which regions generated the highest percentage of positive and negative emojis.

The results: Finding the most negative places on Earth

United States ??

• The most negative states are Delaware, Illinois, and Mississippi

South America ?

• The most negative countries are Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela
• Ecuador is the most negative country we analyzed. 34% of tweets including an emoji were negative ?

Europe ??

• The most negative countries are Netherlands, United Kingdom, and Greece

That’s states and countries, but how about cities? We looked at some of the world’s most populous countries to discover their most negative cities:

India ??

Indore, Malwa – 16.88% negative

Indonesia ??

Bandung, West Java – 16.2% negative

Brazil ??

Fortaleza – 22.33% negative

United Kingdom ??

Livingston, Scotland – 33.67% negative

Germany ??

Berlin – 17.91% negative

France ??

Metz – 20.70% negative

Spain ??

Alicante – 19.72% negative

Italy ??

Florence – 19.19% negative

Turkey ??

Istanbul – 16.48% negative

Russia ??

St. Petersburg – 16.74% negative

United States ??

Paterson, New Jersey – 38.97% negative – officially the most negative place on earth. 

That’s a lot of negativity. But it’s not all bad:

• Most cities are very positive. Even the most negative city (Paterson, New Jersey) still generated 61% positive emoji tweets ?
• However, the ?? is generally pretty negative. The top 20 most negative cities are all from the states ?
• In contrast ?? is very positive. The top 15 most positive cities are all in India ❤️

Clearly we all like a moan, but what are our favorite negative emojis?

Here are the most used negative emojis on Twitter:

That’s the most negative places on earth, but emojis can reveal so much more. If you’re interested in discovering:

• How men and women use emojis
• What the most popular emojis are
• If we use negative emojis more in the evening
• And which brands are hated most (according to emojis)

Download our free emoji report.