In any event, the software first establishes a group’s central personalities by looking at its social graph—much like we portrayed a marriage as edges and nodes before, the software lays out the network, then algorithmically determines its most important dots. Next, it looks at what those dots are saying. Condor has found that while the foci of a movement are positive in their word choice, the movement is vibrant. But negative words like “hate,” “not,” “lame,” and “never” signal decline, and when, as The Economist put it, “complaints about idiots in one’s own movement or such infelicities as
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