The use of swear words in the hashtag feed about the change of twitter to X

The study aims to examine the use of swear words in hashtag feeds about Twitter’s transition to X. The use of swear words arises from users’ dissatisfaction and frustration with the changes occurring on Twitter. There are two problems to be solved in this study, namely: (1) what the types of swear words used by Twitter users in the transition from Twitter to X, and (2) what the functions of the swear words used by users and the reasons behind their use of swear words. This study uses a qualitative approach to analyze the swear words used by Twitter users. The data was collected by using crawling data technique. The data was categorized by type of swear words (mother-in-law, death, animal, sex, excretion, bodily function, and religion) based on Wardhaugh (2006) theory and function of swear words (abusive, auxiliary, expletive, and humorous) based on Andersson & Trudgill (1990) theory using AntConc. The data was analyzed by examining the swear words and emotional content of the posts. The results of this study found that there are five types of swear words: mother in law (mother fucker), animal (bitch and rat), sex (fuck, fuck you, the fuck, and what the fuck), excretion (crap, shit, and shitty), bodily function (ass, big ass, my ass, dumb ass, and ugly ass), and religion (damn, dammit, bloody, damn you, god, hell, and oh my god), as well as four functions of swear words: abusive, directed specifically at Elon Musk; auxiliary, as a reaction to the X icon and notifications that resemble hacking notifications; expletive, as an outlet for frustration over the name and identity change of the Twitter platform to X; and humorous, as a joke about the Twitter change.