Want to Track Every F-Bomb on Twitter? There’s a Website for That

We’ve seen numerous examples over the years of people who’ve said the wrong thing on some social media account and saw it come back to bite them. Some have lost their jobs over it, lost their marriage over it, or at the very least, caused themselves to just look foolish.

Opinions are sure to differ, but I think a lot of people would agree that being profane online doesn’t help exude intelligence, nor does it help make an argument stronger. Yet, you can go to a social networking site like Twitter, type foul language in the search, and easily glean just how many people are being profane online.

It’s one thing to know that, but it’s something else to actually see it. This is the idea behind FBomb.co (via CNET), a website dedicated to mapping – you guessed it – f-bombs all around the world posted on Twitter. This goes beyond a bit of fun for a couple of minutes, however – it’s actually pretty interesting to see where such a word is used around the world. If you load the website up and check on it 30 minutes later, you’re going to witness a couple of interesting trends.

Over the course of the 30 minutes or so that I let the site sit, an enormous number of f-bombs were dropped all over the UK and east coast US. F-bomb usage is almost non-existent in some countries, and rarer in many more – particularly those where English is not the primary language. It’s interesting to note, though, that while Australia is a native English country, the site reported just one f-bomb drop. That’s quite an interesting contrast to the UK or eastern US.

What’d be great to see is a map like this generated after a day’s worth of gathering, but then have markers placed based on f-bomb drop per capita. Canada shows very little usage, for example, but its population is far less than just the east coast of the US. But even then, it looks like the UK and eastern US have got this one locked-down. Grats, I guess?