Carleton student creates Twitter F-bomb detector
Program scans tweets for instances of curse word
It’s one of the most colourful, versatile, offensive words in the English language. It can be used to convey anger, happiness and everything in between.
Now you can find out where in the world people are dropping the F-bomb in real time (on Twitter, at least), thanks to Carleton University student Martin Gingras.
Gingras, 22, created a website, fbomb.co, showing where Twitter users are posting the F-word in real time.
When the word is used in a tweet, a pin drops on a map showing where in the world it was sent from. Clicking on the pin shows the entire message.
The idea originated during a conversation the thirdyear computer science student had with a couple of colleagues while on a co-op stint at BlackBerry.
The colleagues were arguing about something, and eventually someone dropped a bad word.
“It just really degraded the entire level of intelligence of our conversation really quickly,” Gingras said.
The software developers started thinking about how often people swear and how neat it would be to map that out.
Gingras spent a weekend last month working on it, and an application was born.
Spending some time on the page paints a vulgar picture of the Twitter community. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the profane tweets are sent from the United States and United Kingdom.
But keep the map loaded for a while and soon it will be littered with pins all over the world. Clicking on tweets sent from non-English speaking countries often shows “f--k” as the only English word at all.
Within a few days, Gingras added an accompanying Twitter feed that retweets the most popular F-bomb missive every 10 minutes. Undoubtedly one of the most profane Twitter feeds in existence, it chronicles expressions of rage, excitement, frustration or plain indifference from around the world.
“It paints a pretty bad picture of Twitter users,” Gingras said.
The website has taken off far beyond Gingras’ expectations: it has had more than 200,000 unique visitors and received attention from international media.
“I think it’s cool. People are enjoying it. I get emails regularly from people that are like, ‘Wow, this is awesome. I love that you did this.”
He said people have suggested adding swear words in other languages, but he thinks that would undermine the initial point of the website; after all, it’s an F-bomb map.
“Then it’s not the Fword map anymore, it’s the ‘scheisse’ map. That’s not the same thing.”
He has also received other ideas for improvement that he’s thinking of implementing, such as adding a heat map to show popularity.
Gingras has thought about trying to create a customizable application that lets users select their own word filter. But that would involve handling a much larger load of tweets, which he said would pose a challenge.
In the meantime, he’s getting more contract work as a result of this application. This weekend, he’s working on a similar application for an American company that will track accidents on Twitter.
Clicking on vulgar tweets from around the world can be oddly mesmerizing. But Gingras stops short of drawing any grand conclusions from the vulgarity about how people interact online, or in general.
“I think it’s hard to draw anything significant from it just because it is a small sample. It’s Twitter users who say the F-word on social media,” he said.
“But it’s definitely funny to read through them and see some of the ridiculous things people say.”