Twitter Vocabulary Reveals Political Leanings, Study

It is easy to identify people's political leanings just by figuring out their language through sites like Twitter, according to a new study out of Queen Mary University of London.

Researchers studied the language and vocabulary of tweets sent between June 15-30, 2014, by over 10,000 followers who were either Republicans and Democrats, with related Congressional pages. It was a study titled "Twitter Language Use Reflects Psychological Differences between Democrats and Republicans."

Interestingly, the researchers found that Liberals were far more likely to curse, with "f--k" or "s--t" figuring among their top 10 most used words, ie if the commonly used English words were removed. Rather than Conservatives, they expressed themselves through positive emotions and feelings such as "love," "lol," "like" and variants of "amazing" and "happy."

The most commonly used words by Conservatives included: "illegal," "lie," "vote," "administration," "impeach," and "defund." Their tendency is also to use group-oriented words such as "us," "we" and "our," while liberals choice is individualistic, such as "I," "me" and "mine."

"Another interesting effect is the difference in the frequency of mentioning other users," researchers wrote. "The mention ratio was calculated by dividing the total number of mentions (@) by the total number of tweets. On average, Republican users employed mentions significantly more often than Democrat users."

The choice of topical and political issues also differed, with Conservatives talking a lot about religion, and most opting for words like "God" and "psalm." They also chose to express their national identity, the most popular words being "America" and "border."

Liberals did not discuss their leaders, though expected to do it. The Conservatives tended to talk more about them, the main topics of discussion being leaders such as Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. However, Liberals talked a lot about former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Global events also involved the conversation of most Liberals. They often debated Kenya, in which 60 people had been killed, along with "Delhi," which tended to dominate their tweets.

"Open social media provides a huge amount of data for use in understanding offline behaviour. The way people talk and interact on Twitter can provide a more robust and natural source for analyzing behavior than the traditional experiments and surveys," Matthew Purver, from Queen Mary University of London and co-author of the report, said, reported NBC News.

"The results closely matched our predictions based on existing understanding of political supporters' psychology. This means we could use Twitter data in future to better understand people's behavior and personality, while also using psychological research to understand more about Twitter users."

The study was published Wednesday in PLOS ONE.