Research suggests residents in a North Yorkshire seaside resort are the most likely to swear on Twitter in the UK.
An investigation by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at UCL found tweets sent from Redcar and Cleveland were the most profane, with almost 8% of messages sent over a week in August and September containing swearing.
Other council districts named in the ‘top 10’ were Clackmannanshire (7.33% of tweets using offensive language), East Ayrshire (7.24%) and Falkirk (7.12%).
However the study for BBC Radio 4 found the Orkney Islands was council district least likely to curse on social media, with a very civil 0.81% of messages containing offensive language.
The Shetland Islands, Oxford and Westminster were also found to have some of the nation’s cleanest tweets.
Dr Hannah Fry, one of the researchers behind the study, said the results did ‘nothing really to support this idea that people are much less civil to each other within cities’.
‘In fact, based on our study - which does contain only a week’s worth of data - most of the top 10 are actually taken up by rural areas rather than urban,’ she told the BBC.
The 10 regions said to have the most swearing:
- Redcar and Cleveland
- Clackmannanshire
- East Ayrshire
- Falkirk
- Strabane
- North Lanarkshire
- Wellingborough
- Corby
- Northumberland
- North Ayrshire
