Amiens, French champion of the smiling selfie

Can we determine the level of happiness of the inhabitants of a city thanks to their photos on Instagram? This is what the LookFantastic cosmetics sales site seeks to demonstrate. The latter used artificial intelligence to establish the ranking of cities where we seem to be the happiest.

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To do this, a sample of more than 220,000 publications Instagram was analyzed anonymously and randomly. The only conditions? A clearly identifiable face and the mention of the hashtag “#selfieIn the description of the photo. Thanks to an AI of Microsoft Azure, each shot could be divided according to eight key emotions: a neutral expression, of anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness or surprise. The software then assigned a score to each snapshot between 0 and 1 for the level of happiness represented. LookFantastic normalized the score for each photo to be between 0 and 100.

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According to the site, the most dominant emotion on Instagram posts, in France and around the world, is a neutral facial expression. And on a third of the photos, it is the joy that is displayed. Emotions say “negative», Such as anger, sadness or contempt, represent 2% of all images. To complement its study, the site found that some cities were more conducive to happy selfies than others.

More smiles in Amiens than in Nice or Lille

In France, only cities with at least 50 geotagged photos that can be detected by AI were included in the ranking. Amiens ranks as the happiest city in France, scoring 90 out of 100 on the happiness scale, with the score 151% higher than the average selfie taken in the rest of France. The average mark being 36 out of 100. It is then Strasbourg and Avignon who occupy the second and third places on the podium. Paris does not appear in the Top 10, and thus places itself in the twentieth position.

For the rest of the world, it’s Chicago who wins with the most happy selfies. The American city obtains a score of 56 out of 100 on the happiness scale, that is to say 64% more than the global average happiness score, of 34 out of 100. In this Top 20, only one French city appears in 17th position: Toulouse. This world ranking was carried out on the cities with at least 100 geotagged photos and detectable by the AI.

If the conclusions of this study make you smile, however, the results must be taken with caution. Indeed, on Instagram, each post does not contain the hashtag “#selfie”, And so they were not analyzed by the AI ​​of Microsoft Azure. Also pay attention to fashion effects. According to the study, 14% of the images analyzed fall under the “Instagram face”, which is characterized by a pouting and haughty pout and which has been popularized by the stars of the social network.

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