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Redazione RHC : 15 December 2025 06:57
Americans are the most likely to swear on social media, but Australians are more creative in their use of the infamous “f” swear word. This is the conclusion reached by researchers at the University of Eastern Finland after analyzing the behavior of nearly half a million users in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia . They found that people swear more among acquaintances than among close friends and rarely swear on smaller social networks.
The authors of the study, described in a published paper , analyzed user updates and connections on Twitter from 2006 to 2023, supplementing them with metadata related to the location and context of communication. First, the researchers selected over 2,300 spelling variations of the f-word, including misspellings and intentional distortions, and then tracked how and in which networks they were used. Using computational methods, they then estimated the density of social connections and the size of networks to understand exactly where swear words are most common.
The study revealed three key trends. First, users swear more often when communicating with distant acquaintances than with close friends. Second, in very small networks, up to 15 people, swearing is almost never used, regardless of how close the people are. This is consistent with previous observations of people’s behavior in very small social networks and demonstrates that the size of the network itself significantly influences the tendency to swear.
Third, as a network grows, the distinction between friends and acquaintances gradually blurs. In very large networks, starting with about 100-120 members, connection density has virtually no effect on the frequency of swearing: users swear more or less equally, regardless of how well they know each other.
This finding mirrors previous studies on trust and interaction in social groups, where a similar threshold of approximately 100 members has already been identified as the threshold beyond which social mechanisms change significantly.
At first glance, studying swear words online may seem like a light and frivolous topic.
However, the researchers note that such analysis can help identify fake accounts and participants in disinformation campaigns on social media. People’s actual behavior, including how and where they swear, creates a unique linguistic and social “fingerprint” of a user that is difficult to fake.
According to the study’s lead author, Professor Mikko Laitinen, text analysis alone is no longer sufficient, as generative AI has become adept at mimicking human language . Therefore, it’s important to also consider the structure of communication networks themselves, including the connections an account establishes, its duration, and its behavior in different contexts.
Overall, data on language, swear word frequency, and network characteristics can help distinguish a genuine user from an artificially created profile intent on spreading misinformation.
This research requires a combination of linguistics and computer science, so Laitinen’s team includes both philologists and big data analysts. The researchers believe these interdisciplinary approaches will form the basis of future tools for identifying fake accounts, information operations, and other online threats.
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