How America Swears: Here’s a Heatmap Tracking Twitter Profanity
We know, at this point, how the nation tweets. But what about how the nation swears?
The Ukrainian-based web development firm Vertaline, aiming to answer that question, scanned tweets posted from across 462 specific locations in the U.S. The team then isolated particular phrases from those tweets — one of those phrases being, yep, “fuck you,” which they tracked between July 14 and July 24, 2012. They then created a dynamic heatmap that portrays the density of the F-bomb-laden tweets as they were distributed geographically throughout each day of their date range, measured once per hour.
The screencapped maps above and below track our great nation’s keyword-ed conversation as it played out over a single day: Saturday, July 14. Particularly on the coasts, it seems — and even more particularly in L.A. and NYC — many, many fucks were given.