There are plenty of bad jokes, self-indulgent whining sessions, and random dramatic rants to be found on Facebook walls, but apparently there's also a great deal of profanity on the social network. According to one service, about 47 percent of users have some kind of vile filth on their walls.
The numbers come from the folks behind Facebook monitoring service Reppler, which crunched some numbers and analyzed the contents of about 30,000 Facebook walls. From that data, Reppler came to these conclusions:
- 47% of [Reppler] users have profanity on their Facebook Wall.
- 80% of [Reppler] users who have profanity on their Facebook Wall have at least one post/comment with profanity from a friend.
- 56% of the posts/comments with profanity on a user’s Facebook Wall come from friends.
- Users are twice as likely to use profanity in a post on their Facebook Wall, versus a comment. Whereas friends are twice as likely to use profanity in a comment on a user’s Facebook Wall, versus a post.
- The most common profane word is derivations of the “f-word”. The second most common profane word is derivations of the word “sh*t”. ”B*tch” is a distant third.
"So what," you might think. "What are a few curse words here and there?"
Well, Reppler explains that the "prevalence of profanity on Facebook walls is an increasingly important issue as a user’s Facebook profile comes under closer scrutiny, particularly by employers as they screen job applicants."
Based on the data collected, most of the profanity on users' walls comes from foul-mouthed friends, so even the cleanest-mouthed individuals would have to keep a close eye on their social networking profiles to prevent content that might offend prudish potential employers.
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Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked on Facebook.