A NEW STUDY by Cornell university has found that the virtual society is just as clique-ridden as the actual one.

The study, which was commissioned by New Scientist magazine, conducted an analysis of millions of tweets – and found that those who score highly on a “subjective well-being” (SWB) index  (which, roughly translated, means they’re happy) tend to spending most of their time tweeting other similarly cheery sorts.

Likewise, those with less positive outlooks tend to flock together on Twitter.

The scientists tracked 102,000 Twitter users over six months, analysing the 140-character-or-less text from 129 million of their tweets with standard techniques from psychology. According to New Scientist this means that:

They measured the emotional content of the tweets as reflected in the presence of positive or negative words from a lexicon previously established by psychologists. From this they could assess the “subjective well-being” of the users through their tweets.

As Mashable puts it, the findings of the study will disappoint those who believed social media would herald the dawn of a utopian era of communication without borders. “On Twitter, it seems, there are already at least two walled-off nations: happy people and unhappy people.”