Facebook Reveals Data About What We Really Say Online

Hong Kong Rugby Sevens: beer, costumes and, somewhere, a result

Fans wearing emoji masks watch a rugby match of the Hong Kong Seven 2015 in Hong Kong, China, 28 March 2015. At the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens 120,000 people turn up, a lot of beer is drunk, colorful costumes are flaunted and Fiji normally wins. This year was the 40th anniversary of the tournament and the event followed the script. Fiji beat New Zealand 33-19 in the final to win for a record 15th time, and the crowd barely noticed. One of the loudest cheers of the day came when Zimbabwe scored a try against Russia. Neither nation is known for its rugby. There were also noisy jeers when Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying was announced at the prize giving cermony. The rugby forms a backdrop in Hong Kong to the crowd, the reveling thousands who turn up in coordinated costumes to party and drink beer, sold in one-liter plastic cups. Long lines form for the south stand of the Hong Kong Stadium, the most raucous spot to sit or stand. Long lines then also form for the bathrooms. Many people in the stadium weren't watching the rugby, instead swiveling away from the pitch to look at the people in the crowd behind them as they danced and threw rugby balls and glasses of beer at each other.

Photograph by AP

Do you do a lot of laughing online? How do you express your chortles–with a hearty haha or are your more of a LOLer, yourself?

Well now you can tell exactly how your e-laughing compares with the average joe’s, after Facebook (FB) published an analysis on it’s research blog. Inspired by a New Yorker blog post about the various ways we indicate laughter online, researchers, “analyzed de-identified posts and comments posted on Facebook in the last week of May with at least one string of characters matching laughter,” the post reads. “We did the matching with regular expressions which automatically identified laughter in the text, including variants of haha, hehe, emoji, and lol.”

Here’s what they found:

As denizens of the Internet will know, laughter is quite common: 15% of people included laughter in a post or comment that week. The most common laugh is haha, followed by various emoji and hehe. Age, gender and geographic location play a role in laughter type and length: young people and women prefer emoji, whereas men prefer longer hehes. People in Chicago and New York prefer emoji, while Seattle and San Francisco prefer hahas.

Here’s the distribution of different kinds of laughs:

And this map will show you where these different types of laughs are most common:

To dig even deeper into the data, check out Facebook’s research blog.