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Original poster

Swearing spiked on Mumsnet after every announcement of a school closure

4 replies

BuffySummersReportingforSanity · 01/06/2021 08:04

I do enjoy how much attention the Economist has devoted to just how much we fucking swear. Also I didn't know we had a "swearometer".

www.economist.com/international/2021/05/22/how-the-pandemic-has-upended-the-lives-of-working-parents (subscription required to read)

Swearing spiked on Mumsnet after every announcement of a school closure
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MNHQ

RowanMumsnet · 02/06/2021 13:55

@Pongo101

(I would hope) the likely scenario is that Mumsnet has its own analysis tool for gathering this data and has issued a press release or similar on the topic.

Imagine finally securing your internship at the economist and then on your first date "right mate, you are going to have to read ALL the threads on Mumsnet and count the swear words" and you are just sat there thinking mum & dad were right, studying journalism was a bad idea, why didn't I pick physics.

Hello!

Yes our marvellous data team came up with the Swearometer a while back - I think we first deployed it during Brexit - and it's been swarmed over by journos ever since because it does offer a literally graphic way into the thoughts of 'ordinary people' (that's you lot) on various topics, especially when the peaks coincide with news events.

In fairness to the Economist though I think we nicked the Swearometer idea from them in the first place because of their analysis of swearing on MN in the piece from a few years back linked earlier in the thread.

Anyway please do give our data team some appreciation for this - they have to spend hours striving in the MN data salt mines for this stuff Grin

MNHQ

RowanMumsnet · 03/06/2021 09:41

@SirSamuelVimes

Back to the fucking coal face, data team! We've loads more fucks for you to count! (And a few cunts too).

@RowanMumsnet do advertisers really not like our swearing? What do they say about it? And conversely, are there any that are more interested in advertising on the site because of the swearing? This is fascinating!

I don't know that individual bigger brands have a big problem with swearing, although I guess they might not tell us about it if they did. I do know that a while back we had a problem with the automated filters on some kinds of advertising - lots of the big ad platforms had a blacklist of words that advertisers' content couldn't appear next to, which included not only swear words but also things like 'breasts' and 'sex'. We had to try to explain to them that yes, a forum mostly populated by mothers was going to include quite a lot of references to bodily parts and sexual functions, and that it wasn't necessarily Adult Content in the way they assumed...
MNHQ

RowanMumsnet · 03/06/2021 12:11

And now, a message from our data team (hopefully addressing some of your questions on this thread):

Thanks MNers for all the appreciation and we are glad you enjoy the swearometer. We started the swearometer during the Brexit process in 2019 when we noticed that we could measure the Brexit craziness through increases in swearing on the Politics and Brexit forums, and - when things got particularly mad - across the site. We did try the swearometer for the full range of MN swearwords, but found that 'fuck' and 'shit' dominate so widely that the others made little difference and if anything made the results more noisy. Also swearwords that are used to refer to a disliked individual (eg 'bastard' or a number of words beginning with c...) are more likely to be about private individuals (eg someone's DH or DP) then a news item.

The Covid swearometer has been spot on - the peaks not written in to the Economist graph are when Boris cancelled Christmas (19th December) and we even got a small swearing peak for Dominic Cummings' Rose Garden appearance.

Mumsnet language is a pleasure to work with and as a team we do our best to show the diversity of opinion and expression through data analysis to share the difficulties faced and insight derived from our brilliant users. We have also done work in the pandemic on studying mental health related language to understand the impact on mental health of both parents and children throughout this pandemic (we found that concern for children's mental health peaked last August before the return to school and during the recent set of school closures).

We'd love to hear what you think we should be looking into too!

MNHQ

RowanMumsnet · 03/06/2021 13:45

Yep it is interesting stuff isn't it - there's a thesis to be written in this I'm sure

anyway if you have any more ideas for things our team should analyse do shove them our way...

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