(Photo: Lynton Web)

A year-long study conducted by the Pew Research Center has confirmed what we've known all along: Twitter is a rotten cesspool of smug, cynical douchebags consistently trying to out-mean and one-up each other. Oh, had you not noticed?

The study compared the tone of tweets to national polls regarding eight major national events, and found that though sometimes Twitter responses skewed liberal and sometimes they skewed conservative, they were almost always negative. Like, way more negative than the average member of the American public. "Often it is the overall negativity that stands out," reads the study. We're all a bunch of negative nancies, okay?

Still, the overall negativity on Twitter over the course of the campaign stood out. For both candidates, negative comments exceeded positive comments by a wide margin throughout the fall campaign season. But from September through November, Romney was consistently the target of more negative reactions than was Obama.

The study points out that the difference in opinion between Twitter users and the general public has a lot to do with the types of people who congregate on Twitter, specifically during newsworthy events. They tend to be younger and more Democratic, and tweets of those under 18 and in different countries were included in the study, whereas these demographics can't participate in national polls. Also, they probably have seen Mean Girls one too many times.

Wait 'til the Gowanus Dolphin guy hears about this.

News you can use (if you are a hedgehog).

Coming soon to a Newsroom episode near you: The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reports today that people are increasingly turning to YouTube for news. Walter Cronkite it ain't, but what are you gonna do?

The report illustrates its findings with the example of the  2011 Japanese tsunami. In the seven days after the disaster, "the 20 most viewed news-related videos on YouTube all focused on the tragedy," and they were viewed more than 96 million times. That's pretty impressive, but it's not exactly eclipsing the evening news:

"Twenty-two million people on average watch the evening news on the three broadcast channels each night in the United States alone, and larger numbers watch local TV newscasts."

Pew insists the tsunami is a representative example, noting that, "in 2011 and early 2012, the most searched term of the month on YouTube was a news related event five out of 15 months." But the study also noted that,

The most popular news videos tended to depict natural disasters or political upheaval-usually featuring intense visuals. With a majority of YouTube traffic (70%) outside the U.S., the three most popular storylines worldwide over the 15-month period were non-U.S. events. The Japanese earthquake and tsunami was No. 1 (and accounted for 5% of all the 260 videos), followed by elections in Russia (5%) and unrest in the Middle East (4%).

In other words, the news videos that blow up look a lot like the Internet's typical viral content.

And it sounds like news organizations are smart enough to realize that and borrow a little bit of YouTube's rocket fuel, too. For all the talk of citizen journalism, the report points out that much of the citizen-shot footage was uploaded to YouTube by news organizations. The overall most-watched video (CCTV footage from the Sendai airport) prominently features a Russia Today logo in the lower third.

Hey, wait a minute--hasn't "if it bleeds, it leads" been a news cliche for decades now?

"I can't believe you think I like attention!"

"Warning to parents," Vator News cried out yesterday, "this is what your teen does online." Exclamation points implied! So what's the terrifying new teen pastime parents should be panicked about? According to Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, teenagers are, get this, using online video.

The actual study doesn't adopt Vator New's fear-mongering tone, except in the way that all sentences about the online activities of teenagers sound like they're pulled from a "Nightline" investigation. "Nearly 2 in 5 online teens (37%) say they have video chatted with someone else using applications such as Skype, iChat or Googletalk." Ahhhhh, lock up your kids.

The study looks at habits around shooting, sharing, and streaming, where the gender divide seems to have closed. "One major difference between now and 2006 is that online girls are just as likely these days to upload video as online boys," say the researchers. Some interesting demographic trends also come into light when it comes to chatting.

Forty-two percent of girls who use the Internet say they have video-chatted, compared to 33 percent of boys. White teenagers who are online are more likely to video chat than Latino teenagers who use the Internet--41 percent versus 28 percent. Although the study notes, "There are no statistically significant differences between online black youth and either white or Latino youth in video chatting."

Parents's income and education are also a factor:

Online teens from families with the lowest levels of parental education – where a parent has not received a high school diploma – are much less likely than others to video chat with just 14% of teens in those families video chatting, compared with 40% of teens with parents with higher levels of education.

In a similar vein, teen internet users from higher income families are more likely to video chat than lower income teens. Of online teens from families earning $75,000 or more annually, 46% use video chat, while 32% of online teens from families earning under $50,000 annually use these services.

Teenagers who use Facebook and Twitter are also more inclined to video chat. The study says, 41 percent of Facebook users video chat compared to only 25 percent of non-users. With Twitter it's 60 percent of users, compared with 33 percent of non-users.

In Vator News parlance, that probably makes social media a gateway drug, right?