Twitter really is full of #pottymouths, a new study confirmed.
According to researchers at Wright State University in Ohio, about one in every 13 tweets contains a swear word.
And a certain four-letter f-word is a clear favorite among users. F-bombs make up nearly 35% of all curse words on Twitter, the paper says.
The list of popular but NSFW words also includes “s–t” and “a–.”
“Because of social media, people don’t see each other. They can say things they wouldn’t say in the physical world,” paper lead author Wenbo Wang told Co.Exist.
The researchers, who are all affiliated with the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, looked at a random one-month sample of 51 million tweets in English from 14 million users.
They compiled a lexicon that would make even a sailor blush, which took into account Internet variations of swear words that include symbols like “@” and “$.”
The team found that tweets with foul language are the most common on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Social media swearing reaches its peak relative to tweet volume during the 12 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. time slot.
The study also showed that men are more likely to curse than women, but both are more prone to cussing when talking to someone of the same gender over Twitter.
Of course, tweets with swear words aren’t always malicious or negative. For example, there is a big difference between telling someone “I f—–g love you” and saying “f–k you.”
The researchers did try to take this into account. They developed algorithms to classify the tweets as based on five different emotions: anger, joy, sadness, love and thankfulness.
While there were examples of playful tweets with salty language — the study cites friends saying “you whore” — most were angry or sad in tone.
Another notable tidbit from the study is that retweets contain the highest cursing ratio compared to mentions, replies, starters and updates.
The paper was presented Tuesday at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing.
