Tweets can tell if you are liberal or conservative

Liberals, when tweeting about public figures, were more likely to tweet about Dick Cheney.

Republicans were also more likely to discuss religion, including the words “god” and “psalm” in a large number of tweets.

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.

Contrary to what might be expected, it was Republican followers who mostly talked about US Democrat president Barack Obama.

The paper analysed large United Kingdom studies which compared childhood intelligence with political views in adulthood across more than 15,000 people. Liberals focused more on worldwide news and incidents; Kenya was mentioned frequently – 60 people there had been killed in violent attacks during the study – as well as Delhi, where an illegally constructed building collapsed and killed 10 people.

They found that liberals were more likely to swear, with “f***” and “s***” in their top-10 used words, but rather than being aggressive or insulting, researchers suggested that the expletives were a product of “emotionally expressive language”.

“Open social media provides a huge amount of data for use in understanding offline behavior”, co-author Dr. Matthew Purver said in a press release. Liberals were also more likely than conservatives to express more positive emotions, as well as language associated with anxiety and feelings.

‘The way people talk and interact on Twitter can provide a more robust and natural source for analysing behaviour than the traditional experiments and surveys’.

In the current study, researchers found this preference also surfaces in everyday language on Twitter, with liberals more likely than conservatives to use words like “I” and “me”, while conservatives use words like “we” and “our” more.

Sylwester and Purver also noticed that the presumed Democrats “tend to use first-person singular pronouns more often than Republican followers, which we interpret as their greater desire for emphasizing uniqueness”.

The reason for the difference, the authors found is those on the right are more likely to believe that they have free will and that individuals have the power to change things.

In three studies, USA scientists tested the abilities of two groups: undergraduates who considered themselves politically conservative and “liberals”.

There appears to be as great a divide in the use of language in tweets between Republicans and Democrats as there is in political perspective.

Liberals swear more than their conservative brethren.

Instead of focusing on the words people used most, they examined the most “differentiating” words – that is, words that were embraced by one group and largely ignored by the other.