Potty-mouthed travellers and cursing motorists are venting their frustration on Twitter according to an interactive smart map tracking Australia’s crudest tweets.

Airports, traffic lights, nightclub precincts and sporting venues have been revealed as the nation’s swearing hotspots by the online map.

Created by smart mapping giant Esri Australia, the map lets users zoom down to suburb-level detail to visualise where tweets are coming from.

Esri Australia developer Simon Jackson said the results were collated from 4.1 million tweets sent between June 2013 and March 2014 which were harvested from accounts with location services activated.

“We cross-referenced these tweets against a list of 1,000 obscenities and displayed the rude ones as red dots on the smart map,” Mr Jackson said.

“The result is a significant amount of red around sporting fields, stadiums and, as you would expect, in city centres.

“The ‘F’ word and all its colourful variations were the most popular swear words tweeted, while ‘WTF’ – a slang expression of surprise – was also up there.

“Overall, more than 127,000 – or around 3 per cent of tweets – contained expletives.”

South Australia has the dubious honour of having the highest proportion of tweets filled with rude words at 3.6 per cent.

In another fascinating insight, it appears motorists are regularly ignoring smartphone laws by using their time stuck at traffic lights to send off tweets.

“Many major intersections and busy routes are highlighted on the smart map by the tweets people send while waiting for a green light,” Mr Jackson said.

“Air travellers are also ignoring safety directions to keep phones off until the terminal, with many tweets being recorded from planes still on the runway.”

Australia’s most populous state – New South Wales – is home to the most prolific tweeters, with nearly one and a half million recorded and mapped for the project.

The smart map also displays tweets using the five most commonly used foreign languages – Japanese (39,623), Malay (37,734), Arabic (29,417), Indonesian (24382) and Spanish (15180).

“It’s remarkable to see the splashes of colour representing each language as they are mapped out across every suburb’s streets,” Mr Jackson said.

“Only about 10 per cent of Australians share their location on Twitter so it is only a snapshot, but it is a fascinating one.”

Mr Jackson said the same approach behind the map has also proved crucial during natural disasters, provided insights into voter sentiment during elections; and helped identify health and disease patterns.

“During last year’s bushfires in New South Wales we combined real-time data from government agencies with relevant tweets to provide up-to-date information on the blazes as they unfolded,” Mr Jackson said.

“Social media was also widely used with mapping technology at the last federal election.

“Esri Australia put together an election map which allowed voters to gain insights into the demographics of their electorate, issues raised by fellow constituents and the performance of those standing for election.”

The map can be found at: http://languagesofaustralia.com/index.html

Use the gear icon in the upper right hand corner to toggle between languages and profanity.
Matt Mullens