Who curses more on Twitter, liberals or conservatives?
You might think that the people tweeting most about Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi would be liberals. But you'd be wrong. According to a new study of nearly a million tweets from over 10,000 Twitter users, Republicans dominate the talk about their opponents.
On the flip side, Democrats give the most tweet-service to Dick Cheney.
A study analyzing tweets sent in June 2014 from accounts of people who follow either the Republican or Democratic political figures on Twitter found that not only do people spend more time tweeting about pols they don't support than those they do, the frequency with which they use certain -- entirely nonpolitical --words is a strong indicator of their political leanings.
Those words include some unsavory phrases, favored especially by liberals.
After removing most commonly used English words, the study found that "f--k" and "s--t" rank among liberals' top ten most used words. The researchers, from Queen Mary University of London, believe this is reflective of a liberal tendency to use more emotionally expressive language.
A study published in March scoured 18 years' worth of the Congressional Record and found that liberal members of Congress expressed "more frequent and intense" positive behavior.
The new research, published in the journal PLOS One, also uncovered that liberals use more self-referential language, employing the words "I" and "me" more often than conservatives, who opted more for group words such as "we" and "us."
Republicans were also more likely to discuss religion, including the words "god" and "psalm" in a large number of tweets.
"The results closely matched our predictions based on existing understanding of political supporters' psychology," Matthew Purver, a coauthor of the study, said in a statement.
The researchers think that the clear distinctions between the way liberals and conservatives talk online could give pollsters and politicos a greater understanding of what their constituencies are really thinking.