Presenter: Dylan Lew – Psychology
Co-Presenter(s): Olivia Ward, Josh Weinrobe, Evan Wong
Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk
Session: (In-Person) Oral Panel—Communication: How and Why
This is an observational study to see how the use of taboo language on social media platforms changes depending on the anonymity of its users. To accomplish this, we examined the contents of comments on posts from three different social media platforms: Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter. Each of these varies slightly in how much emphasis is put upon the user’s image, with Instagram emphasizing personal content production (selfies, snapshots, etc.) while Twitter and Reddit content being more impersonal (e.g. discussions, news, etc.). We hypothesized that users on platforms that promote personal content less would correlate with less frequent usage of taboo words, as usage of these words could be considered harmful to a user’s image. For several days, we collected 100 comments total across several posts and tallied the number of total swears present across all comments. We also categorized each swear into either definite swears, and non-definite swears whose taboo nature is debated in order to measure the intensity of swearing. Our preliminary results conform to our initial hypothesis, with Instagram comments having much lower amounts of swearing present than on Reddit or Twitter. This may indicate that anonymity plays a significant role in user behavior online regarding swearing, with more anonymity corresponding with more intense and/or frequent swearing.