Twitter is bringing down your reading level. See if you rank higher than Leo DiCaprio...
So, you breezed through War and Peace. Twice. But Are you tweeting like a twelve-year-old?
You can find out exactly just how intelligently you’ve been portraying yourself on the Internet with Time Magazine’s new tool that analyses your reading level by tallying up the amount of big words you use.
When Time used the tool to analyse the top 500 most popular celebrities on Twitter, they came up with some pretty unexpected results. Leonardo Dicaprio is the smartest celebrity on twitter.
Using an algorithm called SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook- the latter meaning words of 3-4 syllables), the tool reads your last 20 tweets to decide your reading level.
Side note: We get that it would be pretty hard to write a tweet worthy of defending your PHD in just 140 characters.
The results also revealed that Paris Hilton has a higher reading level than Stephen Fry and J.K. Rowling. You’d think the coiner of phrases like ‘wingardium leviosa’ would be taking the cake for multi-syllabic word use, but according to SMOG, Ms Hilton’s got a much more varied vocab than the Harry Potter author.
Rapper Ludacris came fourth on the list. So being a professional wordsmith does have its perks. And Pitbull ranked higher than Oprah Winfrey. Weird.
As for politicians, Obama currently stands as an 8th grader (13 years-old); that’s one year older than David Cameron.
Time’s tool also suggests that a tweet only needs to be at a fourth grade (nine year-old) level to be comprehensible, like Kim Kardashian’s and Kanye West’s. First the most popular picture on Instagram, and now the most universally understood twitter feeds? We think they might be onto something, here…
The top 20 smartest celebrity tweeters are:
1. Leonardo DiCaprio, grade level: 7.5 (13 years old) 2. Pattie Mallette, grade level: 7.3 (12 years old) 3. Jimmy Kimmel, grade level: 7 (12 years old) 4. Ludacris, grade level: 6.8 (12 years old) 5. Green Day, grade level: 6.8 (12 years old) 6. Samuel L. Jackson, grade level: 6.8 (12 years old) 7. Usher, grade level: 6.6 (12 years old) 8. JWOWW, grade level: 6.6 (12 years old) 9. Wyclef Jean, grade level: 6.5 (11 years old) 10. Jessie J, grade level: 6.5 (11 years old) 11. Kevin Spacey, grade level: 6.5 (11 years old) 12. Eva Longoria, grade level: 6.5 (11 years old) 13. Mike Tyson, grade level: 6.5 (11 years old) 14. Rev Run, grade level: 6.5 (11 years old) 15. Paulo Coelho, grade level: 6.4 (11 years old) 16. Seth MacFarlane, grade level: 6.4 (11 years old) 17. Paris Hilton, grade level: 6.4 (11 years old) 18. Pharrell Williams, grade level: 6.4 (11 years old) 19. Flo Rida, grade level: 6.4 (11 years old) 20. Nicole Richie, grade level: 6.4 (11 years old)