Poll of the Day > Study shows Americans are meaner on Twitter than Canadians.

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/03/672817706/examining-differences-between-canadian-and-u-s-tweets

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0206188#sec004

A recent study conducted by researchers in Canada found that tweets by Canadians tend to have more positive words than tweets by Americans.

The study used a data set of 40 million tweets it eliminated bots and tweets that were not in English to determine characteristics of Canadian users versus American users. Bryor Snefjella, a researcher at McMaster University in Ontario, was the lead author in the study.

"What we found is that if you go into Twitter and you quantify the most ... characteristic language of Canadians and Americans, you find that that characteristic language really, really strongly matches the sort of established stereotypes of Canadians and Americans," Snefjella says in an interview with Morning Edition's David Greene.

A team of computational linguist researchers parsed through the words and symbols of tweets that were marked with latitude and longitude coordinates. The study showed that the tweets reflected the "nice Canadian" and "rude American" stereotypes.

"For Canada, you're talking about words like 'great,' 'amazing,' 'awesome,' 'thanks,' being very characteristic," Snefjella says. "For Americans, it's words like swear words of all kinds ... and then a lot of words of that [evoke] negative emotional states like 'hate,' 'miss,' 'bored,' 'tired.' "

But as for why Americans and Canadians choose to tweet this way that's much harder to determine, Snefjella says.

"It's a very, very difficult question to answer," Snefjella tells Greene. "There is a whole body of research in social psychology that basically says that those stereotypes of us aren't true. If you just survey lots of Canadians and Americans ... personality traits on average just don't seem to be any different."

The study, Snefjella says, shows that, on Twitter, Canadians and Americans construct stereotypes through the words users choose to type.

"We're actually pointing that maybe the true thing isn't our characters; maybe the true thing is how we choose to talk," Snefjella says.

And according to Snefjella, that is something people have the power to change.

"So if what we're finding in this study is the sum of the language choices of Canadians and Americans, we can make different choices and wind up with a different picture of who we are," Snefjella says.

Danny Hajek and Peter Granitz produced and edited this story for broadcast.

Well, we have Donald Trump
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Were number one! Were number one!
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WastelandCowboy posted...

it eliminated bots and tweets that were not in English

Just going to leave out French Canadians then?
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Swear words don't necessarily mean you are being mean or rude and negative emotions aren't even necessarily rude either
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Muscles posted...

Swear words don't necessarily mean you are being mean or rude and negative emotions aren't even necessarily rude either

But we are. Both mean and rude. I don't often reply to something on twitter without some asshole trying to start an argument by name calling.
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This seems like a worthless study and waste of money.
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dragon504 posted...

This seems like a worthless study and waste of money.

Yeah it's like doing a study on who's meaner between a drunken sailor and a nun.

Who isn't meaner than Canada? And also on what platform would America not be meaner?
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mooreandrew58 posted...

dragon504 posted...

This seems like a worthless study and waste of money.

Yeah it's like doing a study on who's meaner between a drunken sailor and a nun.

Who isn't meaner than Canada? And also on what platform would America not be meaner?

maple syrup debate?
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dragon504 posted...

mooreandrew58 posted...

dragon504 posted...

This seems like a worthless study and waste of money.

Yeah it's like doing a study on who's meaner between a drunken sailor and a nun.

Who isn't meaner than Canada? And also on what platform would America not be meaner?

maple syrup debate?

When I said platform I meant like Twitter or Facebook. But idk I haven't met many Americans that didn't like maple syrup.
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dragon504 posted...

mooreandrew58 posted...

dragon504 posted...

This seems like a worthless study and waste of money.

Yeah it's like doing a study on who's meaner between a drunken sailor and a nun.

Who isn't meaner than Canada? And also on what platform would America not be meaner?

maple syrup debate?

I was thinking "any discussion about hockey", myself.

You want to see a Canadian get mean? Hand them a piece of wood and toss a puck in front of them.
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But pitbulls don't eat babies.

dragon504 posted...

This seems like a worthless study and waste of money.

Spotted the American.
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dragon504 posted...

This seems like a worthless study and waste of money.

Eh, Twitter gives out a free API for ingesting tweets and there is plenty of freeware machine learning tools that can understand their "attitude". All you need is the smarts to build the system and a hard drive big enough to store 40 million tweets.
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Americans are meaner than Canadians?

Gee, thanks long ass article. Would never have known this without u
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FatalAccident posted...

Americans are meaner than Canadians?

Gee, thanks long ass article. Would never have known this without u

Literally wasnt a long article.

FatalAccident posted...

Americans are meaner than Canadians?

Gee, thanks long ass article. Would never have known this without u

Lol for real
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Nice guys finish last

OhhhJa posted...

Nice guys finish last

Unless you're not really a "nice guy", but an incel.