As they continue to give their over 650,000 million users worldwide more privacy controls, social networking site Facebook has its next challenge – profanity. Newly launched social media monitoring service Reppler has been collecting information from users’ Facebook Walls for just over the last month. After analyzing data from over 30,000 users, the company has made the following observations:
- 47% of our users have profanity on their Facebook Wall.
- 80% of our users who have profanity on their Facebook Wall have at least one post/comment with profanity from a friend.
- 56% of the posts/comments with profanity on a user’s Facebook Wall come from friends.
- Users are twice as likely to use profanity in a post on their Facebook Wall, versus a comment. Whereas friends are twice as likely to use profanity in a comment on a user’s Facebook Wall, versus a post.
- The most common profane word is derivations of the “f-word”. The second most common profane word is derivations of the word “sh*t”. ”B*tch” is a distant third.
The potential ramification to a user could range from general embarrassment to potential employment challenges as increasing more and more HR professionals are pre-screen applicants and turning to their social media profiles to gather as much information about a candidate as possible.