D.C. Gives Fewer F*cks Than The Rest Of The Country (On Twitter, Anyway)
While "fuck Trump" has become something of a city-wide rallying cry and a street-art anthem, it hasn't actually translated to Twitter profanity in D.C.
Two data scientists collected more than a million tweets and ran the numbers: Washingtonians say "fuck" on the social media service at about half the national rate.
The word (or a variant with an alternative spelling) appears in roughly 21 out of every 1,000 tweets in America, or roughly 2 percent. In D.C., Travis Hoppe and Rebecca Meseroll write in a Medium post, "our analysis reveals a dearth of fucks in the District relative to the rest of the nation; the local fuck frequency in D.C. is a scant 11.7 per 1000 tweets."
Only tweeters in Montana and Arkansas had a lower rate. At the other end of the spectrum, Nevadans, Californians, and Wyomans come out about five points higher than the national average.
On this map, blue states use "fuck" on Twitter at a lower frequency than the national average, while red states are more profane than the rest of the country. (Courtesy of Travis Hoppe and Rebecca Meseroll)
The pair, who both have doctoral degrees in the sciences and have day jobs at a federal agency, were inspired to investigate profanity on Twitter after Hoppe spotted a book that Meseroll was reading: "What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves."
Hoppe runs the group DC Hack and Tell and has done other projects with Twitter, looking at how people interact and use emojis on the service. "I had some experience in how people communicate on social media in what we think are irrelevant ways," he tells DCist. "But they aren't really because that's how we communicate."
They went with "fuck" as opposed to other common curse words, because, well, they figured that's what a seven-year-old would probably say is the worst of the bunch.
It was edged out, though just barely, by 'shit' as the most commonly used curse word on Twitter. Over a similar sample size of Facebook interactions, 'shit' and 'fuck' were the top two most-used curse words on the platform (followed by 'damn,' 'bitch,' and 'crap').
Out of 10.7 million tweets in a 2.5 week period, these were how frequently curse words were used. (Courtesy of Travis Hoppe and Rebecca Meseroll)
Twitter is a rich tapestry, though, and they didn't just stop there with the analysis. Hoppe and Meseroll found that tweets with more than one obscenity (even 'darn') were most likely to contain a 'fuck,' too. A notable exception, they note, is 'cock' ("for tweets with more than one curse word, the presence of one ‘cock’ in a tweet is a strong indicator for a second.")
And spelling matters, too. Plenty of people expand the word with extra 'u's or 'k's—most commonly, for both, is four: fuuuuck or fuckkkk.
"That part is hilarious to me, the fact that there’s a peak—there’s an optimal number of 'u's," Hoppe says. "When you start looking at a lot of social media posts, you see creativity in the way we communicate, in all the crazy shit that people say. I think about it to from a linguistic perspective. This is how we’re communicating. How many fucks do we give?"
And in D.C., the answer is relatively few.
"There's probably a high percentage of professional tweeting, so maybe that is depressing the amount of fucks that are given," Meseroll guesses.
A different set of researchers actually found that Washingtonians say 'fuck' at about an average rate as the rest of the country. But that appears to be because they averaged out the data across the region—and the suburbs are actually higher than the national average. When looking at that raw data set, D.C. does come in lower.
"What surprises me about it is that people are not surprised," Hoppe says. "'They're like 'oh yeah, nobody says fuck in D.C. Of course not, it's because of their jobs.' But then you see all this geographical diversity; it's really interesting."
The red dots around D.C.'s blue dot show that, while the city is below average in number of 'fuck's given on Twitter, the suburbs are actually higher than the rest of the country. (Courtesy of Travis Hoppe and Rebecca Meseroll)
At one point Meseroll, who had tweeted a grand total of nine times before embarking on this experiment, got to wondering if California and Nevada's propensity for profanity had anything to do with the porn industry. But after manually tagging several thousand tweets ("my eyes were like bleeding by the end of that," she says), she realized that very few of them were actually referring to sex.
She did notice a bunch of Lakers-related 'fuck's at the beginning, which they initially thought might account for California's high frequency, but the trend stayed the same throughout the period.
While the project's size and methodology probably wouldn't pass muster for an academic journal, Hoppe says, it's still a good representative sample.
They collected the data over two and a half weeks last month, right around the time that Anthony Scaramucci was directing a firehose of obscenities at the New Yorker.
It's not all bad, though.
The researchers also used a "sentiment analysis" tool that gauged if the tweets using 'fuck' were negative, neutral, or positive. Surprisingly, about a quarter were quite chipper.
"I found the positive ones to be super delightful," says Meseroll. "Like the one where the person is all caps in love with their cats, and the world just needs to know."