We're bringing the Facebook Gross National Happiness index to 18 additional countries today, including Germany, India and Spain. As before, we analyzed the use of positive and negative words in status updates to estimate the happiness of people on Facebook in each of the countries.

We chose the countries based on those with the highest volumes of status updates in one of the languages that we currently support: English, Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish. This is because we need a large number of status updates in order to build a model that is not easily affected by random variations in word usage. Our methodology also requires us to have reliable, validated dictionaries of positive and negative words in the languages we analyze, which is why we do not yet support all languages.

We found that a country's happiness score is representative of the country's culture and experience on a particular day. Besides popular holidays like Christmas and New Year's Day, we see a spike in Spain's happiness index corresponding to Saint Jordi's day in Apri. In India, Holi in March and its Independence Day in August also lead to peaks, as do big sports victories in many of the countries. In the United States, we see similar spikes every Super Bowl.

Sports also can lead to some of the lowest days in the happiness index. Ireland's score drops on Nov 18, 2009, when FIFA awarded a controversial win to France over Ireland in the World Cup playoffs. Similarly, Germany's happiness level dips on Nov 10, 2009, when the goalie Robert Enke committed suicide.

Unsurprisingly, disasters have a dramatic effect on happiness levels. We see a large dip in India's index on Nov. 27, 2008, the day of the Mumbai terrorist attack. We also notice a huge drop in Chile's index, corresponding to the tragic earthquake on Feb. 27, 2010. Chile's happiness index has still not fully recovered. When another earthquake of a magnitude 6.3 hit central Italy on April 6, 2009, its happiness score dropped, as did Mexico's index between April 24-29, 2009, during the H1N1 flu outbreak and an earthquake.

Check out the graph yourself and see if you can find a significant day in your country.

Cultural differences also play a role in people's weekly happiness cycles and how they celebrate holidays. South Africans are happier on Fridays than Saturdays, a weekly cycle different from that of other countries. In several countries such as Spain and Germany, people are more festive on Christmas Eve than on Christmas Day. One week later, Singaporeans are happier on New Year's Day than New Year's Eve.

Measuring Happiness over Time

Because each country is analyzed separately to reduce effects due to language differences, we cannot directly compare one country's Gross National Happiness to another country's. However, we can compare how the indices of different countries are changing: We can determine whether people on Facebook in specific countries are becoming more or less happy over time. We examined these trends from September 2008 through the present. The results, as well as all the countries with Gross National Happiness indices, are shown below.



Some countries like the U.S. and Canada are seeing increases in both positivity and decreases in negativity. Other countries like India see decreases in negativity, but changes in positivity are not statistically significant. We see an increase in both positivity and negativity in Spain and almost all Spanish-speaking countries. Singaporeans and South Africans, on the other hand, are decreasing their use of emotional words overall.

As always, no one at Facebook reads status updates to conduct this analysis. Instead, computers do the calculations after all personally identifiable information is removed.


Lisa, an intern on Facebook's data team, is now back at the University of Waterloo improving Canadian happiness.

With just a day left before the closely watched general election in Britain, Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats was the clear winner of a mock election held on Facebook, with 42 percent of the vote. David Cameron of the Conservative Party came second with 31 percent, while Gordon Brown of the Labour Party finished in third with 27 percent. A total of 463,000 votes were cast.

The mock election, conducted through a homepage poll displayed to people in the UK who visited Facebook over their bank holiday weekend, was just one in a series of UK election activities happening for the first time on Facebook. At the time of the last British election in 2005, Facebook wasn't available to most people in the UK, while other social networking sites and services were in their infancy.

In 2010, however, Facebook has more people in the UK using it than the total number of votes cast in the last general election. In recent weeks one question has been asked by almost everybody in Britain: What would the impact of the online world be on the political views of the British public?

We'll soon find out how closely the Facebook mock election matches the real one, but since the election was called on April 6, we already have seen people in the UK and around the world flock to Facebook and other sites to get informed, share their opinions and even rate the candidates' debate performances.

To help people join the debate, we launched Democracy UK on Facebook. This Page, which has more than 160,000 people connected to it, has posted a constant stream of serious and light-hearted news and discussion, including question-and-answer sessions with notable journalists providing a range of opinions. Democracy UK also hosted two applications—VoteMatch and My Vote Advisor—to help people determine which party and policies they might most closely align with.

Rating the Debates

While televised debates between political candidates are commonplace elsewhere in the world, this year saw Britain's first experience of them. The TV debates were an historic moment. More than 80,000 people logged on to use ITV's Livestream, which enabled people to post updates alongside the live online streaming of the debate on the ITV website, while thousands of additional people did the same on the Sky News website.

UK broadcasters, though, had restrictions on the type of audience reaction they could show during debates. So we gave people an opportunity on the Democracy UK on Facebook Page to interact with each other and discuss the debates while also giving real-time feedback on the performance of the party leaders. Through the Rate the Debate application, people could participate in a real time "dial test," clicking on a moving dial to indicate their feelings about what was being said at that moment in time and seeing aggregated results (as shown below).



In addition, in partnership with YouTube, Facebook crowdsourced questions from potential voters that were then put to Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Questions were sourced using an application hosted at Democracy UK on Facebook and on YouTube's dedicated election channel.

The result? Party leaders answered the most popular questions based on more than 180,000 votes on the more than 5,300 questions submitted. See the answers by clicking the "Digital Debate" tab on Democracy UK.

Getting Out the Vote

In Britain voters had to be registered by April 20. Research suggested that about 3.5 million people who were eligible to vote in England and Wales were not registered. In response, Facebook and the Electoral Commission worked together to create a new application, enabling the 23 million people using Facebook in the UK to download a personalised voter registration form. The effort increased voter registrations by thousands in a matter of days.

Whether you're in the UK or not, you can follow tomorrow's election by liking the Democracy UK on Facebook Page for more updates and joining future election debates for your country.


Richard, Facebook's director of policy in Europe, is a recovering politician.

Some events in life are spontaneous—such as catching a movie, meeting a friend for dinner or taking an impromptu day trip. So today, we're making it easier to let your friends know about those last-minute plans in our new version of Facebook Events.

You can now create an event directly from the "Events" box on your home page with one step. Just start typing your event into the "What are you planning?" field on the right-hand column of your home page. A form will open. Add a time and place, and you'll be ready to share your plans with your friends.



You can also create events by going to your Events dashboard in the left-hand menu. Once you're there, click the "+Create an Event" button and fill out each field. This more-detailed creation form is useful for more formal events or those you're planning further in advance.



With this update to Facebook Events, we've streamlined the number of options to make it faster and simpler to share your plans. For example, for all events you create, the people you invite will be able to post messages, photos, videos and links on the event's Wall.

You can also choose between two types of events: a public event, available for anyone to RSVP and attend, and a private event. Private events will only be visible to people who have been invited, and only invited people can see the event in their News Feed.

Events created before this launch will maintain all of their settings. Going forward, all new events you create will follow this new format.


Devin Naquin, a Facebook engineer, is planning to go skydiving this weekend.

Safety is Facebook's top priority. Our most talented people are dedicated to creating an environment where people can connect and share comfortably. As a result, we're unveiling today a completely redesigned Safety Center. It offers new safety resources for parents, educators, teens and members of the law enforcement community.

We've quadrupled the safety content available, and we've created cleaner, more navigable interfaces to help you find answers to safety questions fast. This portal—which we've been testing during the past few weeks—draws multimedia content from Facebook and from independent organizations specializing in safety and security online.



In our online safety efforts, we learn from and with the most trusted safety organizations in the world. We regularly invite authors to blog about safety topics from cyberbullying to the importance of "Thinking Before You Post." We've partnered with organizations like MTV and the BBC to educate users about safe online behavior. We worked hard to make reporting abuse faster and simple. Last December, we established a Safety Advisory Board to advise us on best practices.

When you go to the new Safety Center, you'll see content organized by audience type and by topics such as "Addressing Personal Safety" and "Responding to Objectionable Content." Parents will find special content in the "Safety for Parents" section with advice from our partner and member of our Safety Advisory Board, Common Sense Media.

Our Safety Advisory Board has provided invaluable advice. We'll continue working closely with our partners to update and augment the Safety Center. This launch only begins to accelerate our efforts to make Facebook a better and safer place to engage.

Take a moment to visit the new Safety Center, and read more about the members of the Safety Advisory Board below:

• Childnet International is a UK-based charity working domestically and internationally to help make the Internet a great and safe place for children and young people, alongside enabling them to use interactive technologies safely and responsibly. Childnet has developed a number of resources designed to help young people and parents assess and manage the risks that they may encounter online.


• Common Sense Media is an independent non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families by providing trustworthy information and education that kids and families need to thrive in a world of media and technology.


• Connect Safely is the leading interactive resource on the web for parents, teens, educators—everyone—engaged and interested in youth safety on the fixed and mobile social web.


• The Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) works to make the online world safer for kids and their families by identifying and promoting best practice, tools and methods in the field of online safety, that also respect free expression.


• WiredSafety is the largest online safety, education and help group program in the world and provides help, information and education to Internet and mobile device users of all ages, especially on cyberbullying matters.

Just as we hope you'll never stop thinking about your own safety online, we won't stop thinking about—and improving—yours.


Joe, Facebook's chief security officer and a parent of three girls, is reading advice for parents in the new Safety Center.

Last week, a fake $500 Whole Foods coupon scam was going around Facebook, and now nearly 40,000 users have fallen for an Ikea gift card scam on the site. The sad part is that an Ikea scam already happened in Mar 2010.

PC World is reporting that nearly 40,000 Facebook users signed up for a $1,000 Ikea gift card offer early today, which was unfortunately fake. The scam offer, like many others, pulls people into a Facebook Fan Page, then directs them to click on a link to sign up. In addition, users are told that they have to fill out two “offers” from companies — a popular and legitimate way on Facebook to give away freebie items and services. In this case, the companies that users are supposedly filling out offers with are Netflix and CreditReport.com.

Naturally, by making the gift card offer seem like it’s available for a limited time, scammers are going to lure some small percentage of over 400M Facebook users into websites with innocent-seeming domain names, and successfully fill out sensitive personal information. Besides tricking people to reveal such information, possibly for identity theft purposes, a common finish for such scams is to install viruses or other malware on their computers.

Today’s Ikea gift card scam follows another Ikea scam in March that apparently had 70,000 victims. In the PC World article, a Facebook spokesperson suggested that they’re working on a way to automatically remove Fan Pages that host such scams. Three Fan Pages have already appeared warning other Facebook users not to join the offending Page, which appears to have been removed. The site Ikea Fans has more on the scams.

Did you or someone you know fall for the Whole Foods or Ikea scams? If you’re concerned that an offer you’ve seen online, whether at Facebook or elsewhere, is legitimate, check out Scambusters for the latest info. (Warning: annoying popup on Scambusters site.)

Image via Ikea Fans.