Breakups get messier on social media

A new study has revealed that couples who live out their relationships on Facebook or Twitter get into messy interactions after breakup on social media.

The researchers from Finland, Qatar, and the United States noted the types of words couples used pre-breakup and post-breakup, showing that a lot of dirty laundry gets aired on Twitter and said that they were interested to see if there would be a noticeable change in tone when one partner would message the other, either before or after the breakup.

They said that the change is roughly from 'I love you so . . .' to 'I hate when you . . .', indicating a surprising amount of public fighting and insulting happening after the breakup and the spate of "unfollowing" on Twitter after a breakup, with people either losing or ditching 15 to 20 followers after being dumped or doing the dumping.

The researchers said that after the breakup, they were expecting partners to potentially unfollow each other but, apart from that, they were expecting 'business as usual' as far as the social network was concerned and also found evidence of the, to our knowledge, undocumented phenomenon of 'batch un-friending and being un-friended' at the end of a relationship, while observing sudden drops of size 15 to 20 for both the number of friends and followers a user has around the time of the breakup.

While it was found that post breakup, couples who had communicated a lot on social media tended to maintain the high levels of interaction. However, people used more depressed terms, with the rejected partner using depressed language the most.