We like to joke that we Canadians are nice people, but is that really true? Well a new study from McMaster University shows that when it comes to Twitter, Canadians are definitely nicer than americans.
The study gathered three million geo-tagged tweets from a nine month period in 2015. Two PhD candidates by the names of Daniel Schmidtke and Bryor Snefjella then created word clouds and guess what they saw? “We could see the difference between the two countries’ tweets as soon as we created a word cloud of the findings,” Schmidtke said in the release from McMaster University.
And the differences between how Canadians and Americans tweet is quite stark!
The word clouds show disproportionately more US words as compared to Canada (on left) and disproportionately more Canadian words as compared to America (on right). Size of the word is proportional to how overrepresented each word is in each country and colour (deepness) is proportional to absolute word frequency in each country.
Warning, there’s some graphic language.
Ignoring the really bad words, the comparison is quite interesting. Â I love that Canadians use words like Amazing, Great, Beautiful and Favourite the most.
I like to pretend that the most popular tweet is  “Canada is amazing, great and beautiful. It’s my favourite country.”
