Mansfield Twitterati ‘amongst most foul-mouthed in the UK’

A study conducted by University College London (UCL) has revealed that the area has come out 23rd from 405 towns and cities nationally for the amount of ‘effing and jeffing’ by users of social media platform Twitter.

A total of six per cent of tweets from Mansfield users contained bad language, according to the research carried out by Dr Hannah Fry and Dr Ed Manley from the university’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).

Twitter activity in the United Kingdom from any tweet sent from a smartphone with geo-location switched on, from the 28th of August to the 4th of September was monitored as part of the study.

The f-word was the most featured swear word in all of the tweets collected over the course of the week, but still only accounted for 2.16 per cent of tweets that were sent.

Other coarse words that featured prominently were ‘s***’ and ‘a***’. The c-word made up a mere 0.28 per cent of the tweets that were collected.

Redcar and Cleveland was the most foul-mouthed location in the UK, with almost eight per cent of tweets coming from the area containing some kind of swear word.

Wellingborough, Corby and Northumberland were also in the top ten, with the Scots making up the remaining six places. Blackburn and Rochdale were also singled out for the levels of profanities used.

Meanwhile Oxford, Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea were amongst the politest areas in the country, along with Orkney and the Shetland Islands.

Dr Fry said: “Surveying the whole of the UK, it doesn’t appear as though there’s a clear distinction between rural and urban areas, and certainly 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 ten are actually taken up by rural areas.

“Twitter has a reputation for being really the home of angry, aggressive messages that people send each other, but I was a bit surprised that across the entire week, only 4.2 per cent of all tweets contained any kind of profanity. And these are tweets that are made on mobile phones and geolocated, so would tend to be the type of demographic that you would expect to be using the most swear words, namely the younger part of the population. I think it says something a little more positive perhaps about how aggressive or civil we can be to one another.”

The research was carried out as part of a new Radio 4 series called Future Proofing, which explores new ideas that are changing the world.

A UCL spokesman said the research only monitored Twitter use on mobile phones, and was therefore not conclusive.