Mobile platform Foursquare has named the 20 rudest cities in the English-speaking world based on check-in data from their servers. The top American city on the list was not Los Angeles (number-15), but El Paso, Texas, taking second place to Manchester, England.
The Foursquare Engineering blog based this information off of the frequency of curse words in user check-ins, which are meant to be recommendations to other Foursquare users about restaurants, bars and other places. Both Manchester and El Paso boasted an average of 0.016 percent of tips having a curse word.
Foursquare’s findings are experiencing some mixed reactions across the globe. UK newspapers such as the Manchester Evening News and Metro took the honor with stride.
“That might not sound like a lot, but when you consider that Foursquare tips are supposed to be recommending high quality things to fellow users, it’s quite impressive,” said Metro reporter Tom Phillips. “We can only assume that it’s lots of people saying things like ‘try the f—ing lamb’ or ‘the mojitos are the s—t.’”
However, readers of the El Paso Times didn’t feel so proud of their city’s second place ranking and voiced their displeasure on the Times’ message board.
“This survey can’t be taken seriously at all,” said one user.
Claudia Stuart, an instructor of Political Science at WTAMU, says there is some merit in Foursquare’s experiment.
“When people understand how these kinds of comments affect your city, it really can cut into the quality of life,” said Stuart. “I just left Tempe, Arizona, another on the list, and this does influence your movement because of ‘how folks act.’”
WT student Scott Cooper knows personally the type of environment surrounding El Paso.
“I lived in El Paso until my freshman year of high school,” Cooper, a sophomore Social Work major, said. “I saw the change when I moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area and it was a hard knocks lesson.”
