Identifying someone's political leanings may be as easy as looking the language they use on social media sites like Twitter, according to a new study out of Queen Mary University of London.
In the study, titled "Twitter Language Use Reflects Psychological Differences between Democrats and Republicans," researchers examined the vocabulary of tweets sent between June 15-30, 2014 by over 10,000 followers of either Republican (conservatives) or Democrat (liberals) party Twitter accounts, as well as corresponding congressional pages.
Liberals were far more likely to curse, with "f--k" or "s--t" being in their top 10 most used words (after removing the most commonly used English words). They were also more likely than conservatives to express positive emotions and use language associated feelings or anxiety - such as "love," "lol," "like" and variants of "amazing" and "happy."
Conservatives preferred words like "illegal," "lie," "vote," "administration," "impeach," and "defund." They were also more likely to use group-oriented words like "us," "we" and "our," while liberals use more individualistic words that express uniqueness, 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."
Researchers also noted clear distinctions in the discussion of topical and political issues. Conservatives discussed religion more, using words like "God" and "psalm." National identity was another big one for conservatives, with popular words being "America" and "border."
And while liberals may be expected to discuss their party leaders more - Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi - it was conservatives who more often invoked these opposition names. Liberals did, however, discuss former Vice President Dick Cheney more frequently.
Liberals were more likely to talk about international events that were occurring during the time the study was conducted, often mentioning "Kenya," where 60 people were killed in violent attacks, as well as "Delhi," which also dominated headlines during the study, according to researchers.
"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 in a statement, 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.
