Picture a wedding. At the bar, the best man tells a story full of colorful language, and everyone laughs. An hour later, he gives the official toast. Grandma is in the front row, the photographer is filming, and he drops the exact same word. The room goes quiet.
Same person. Same word. But a completely different reaction.
What changed is the expectation. At the bar, swearing fits the moment. During the toast, it breaks an unwritten rule. And if the best man had been formal and polite for the whole speech before that one word, it would have landed even harder.
That gut feeling, that the same words can be harmless in one setting and costly in another, is what new research found in influencer marketing.
Why swearing costs engagement
The researchers analyzed 43,892 videos from 200 of the largest US gaming influencers on a major video-sharing platform. For comparison, they added 1,730 videos from 100 influencers in the how-to and style category, think beauty, fashion, cooking and home improvement. They used speech recognition to count every swear word and compared that with the likes and comments each video received.
The more an influencer swore, the less engagement the video got. In gaming, each extra swear word went with roughly 0.04% to 0.74% fewer likes and comments. That range comes from two different statistical approaches, and the true effect likely sits somewhere in between. For an average gaming video, with about 14 swear words and 41,000 interactions, that adds up to an estimated 230 to 4,030 lost interactions per video.
In how-to and style content, the penalty was much steeper: 0.20% to 6.55% per swear word, roughly five to nine times larger than in gaming.
Why does this happen?
Swearing pulls in two directions. It can feel honest and unfiltered, it carries emotion, and in some communities it signals that you belong. At the same time, it breaks expectations. Audiences hold popular creators to a higher standard of how they speak, so a swear word stands out more. Viewers who know an influencer is paid to persuade may also read swearing as a trick to seem relatable.
The researchers argue the negative side usually wins, for three reasons. Most audiences are mixed, so there is always a group that turns away. People weigh negative impressions more heavily than positive ones. And platforms tend to show profane content to fewer people.
When the penalty gets bigger
The engagement drop was stronger in three situations, in both categories:
When the video was sponsored. Once a brand is involved, viewers expect more professional language.
When the rest of the video was polite. A single swear word in an otherwise friendly, careful video stands out more.
When the influencer was a woman. The researchers link this to old gender norms that see swearing as masculine, so it breaks audience expectations more strongly when women do it.
Habit changes the picture, but only in some categories
In gaming, influencers who already swore a lot in earlier videos paid a smaller price for swearing in a new one. Their audience had adjusted, and viewers who disliked it had likely moved on. When that swearing was spread evenly across past videos, the penalty shrank further.
In how-to and style, this protection barely showed up. A history of swearing gave little help, and a consistent swearing style even made the penalty bigger. In a category where clean language is the norm, a steady swearing style seems to mark the creator as someone who keeps breaking the rules.
What this looks like in practice
Picture a skincare brand choosing between two creators for a sponsored tutorial. Creator A has a loyal following and a warm, polite tone, and every now and then drops a swear word for emphasis. Creator B rarely swears at all. Based on this research, Creator A carries more risk here. The category is strict, the content is sponsored, and the occasional swear word lands in an otherwise polite setting. That is three amplifiers at once. Creator B fits the category norm.
Where this applies, and where to be careful
These findings come from large, established influencers on one video-sharing platform, and engagement here mostly means likes. The study did not include micro-influencers with fewer than 100,000 followers, and it did not measure sales. It also tracks real-world patterns instead of running a controlled experiment, which is why the researchers report a range. In gaming, the low end of that range is modest, while the high end is large enough to matter. Platforms with different moderation rules may produce different reactions.
Take home points:
Swearing in influencer videos goes with lower engagement, and the cost per word is several times higher in categories where clean language is the norm. Know your category’s language norm. Before you brief a creator, look at how people in that niche normally talk. The stricter the norm, the more each swear word costs.
Treat sponsored content as the high-risk zone. The penalty grows as soon as a brand is visibly involved. Put language expectations in your brief and discuss them openly with the creator.
In tolerant categories like gaming, an established swearing style softens the penalty. In stricter categories, it can make it worse.
Before you sign a creator, ask whether the category accepts swearing and whether the creator has a style their audience already knows.
Factor in the double standard. Audiences react more harshly when female creators swear. That reflects audience expectations, not the creator’s quality, but it is a real factor when you plan sponsored content.
Skip the swearing as a shortcut to authenticity. A sudden swear word in otherwise polite content hurts most, and viewers may see it as a tactic. If you want content to feel genuine, keep the creator’s voice consistent.
