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Two bar charts showing data trends. The top chart features a series of green, blue and yellow bars labelled from “10” to “3”. The bottom chart shows a smaller selection of blue and yellow bars labelled from “16th” to “20th”.

What the &#@$!? WTFLevel.com is a real-time Twitter profanity tracker.

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Date
23 November 2012

The world can seem so full of hate at times, especially when we surf the comment sections on websites or browse lively debates taking place within the world of Twitter every second of the day. It’s something we all have come across, and in general it also seems we’re all a bit partial in telling some of these people to go and, let’s just say, do one. And so it goes on until it feels like we’re all doing one, using ever increasing levels of harsh, abusive language.

This gave everyone at Muffinlabs the idea of WTFLevel.com, a site tracking how people express themselves with profanity on Twitter in real-time. This site continuously checks Twitter “for references to a list of swear words”, converting the data into a ‘threat level’ “which is just a spoof of the DEFCON system that kept you up at night as a kid”. The levels of profanity floating round Twitter can be surprising, fluctuating from the mostly polite to the disgusting racist tirades, and now it’s all tracked and categorised for us to explore and think about.

A data dashboard titled “Twitter WTF Level” tracks real-time swearing on the platform. A line graph shows fluctuations in activity, while bar charts summarise profane tweets over the last 24 hours and seven days.
Above

www.wtflevel.com

Two bar charts track the frequency of negative language on social media. The first reads “Last 24 Hours” and “A day’s worth of profane tweets”, while the second reads “Last 7 Days” and “A week of crap people said”.
Above

www.wtflevel.com

A screenshot of a website explaining a “threat level” system. A list of levels includes “Mostly Polite”, “Mild Cursing”, “Tirades”, “Expletive-Laced” and “Oh &@#?@&!”.
Above

www.wtflevel.com

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Ross Bryant

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