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Redcar and Cleveland Twitter users are the most foul-mouthed in the country
Twitter users in Redcar and Cleveland have been named as the biggest swearers in the country.
Dr Hannah Fry, a lecturer in the mathematics of cities and her colleague Dr Ed Manley, were able to create a map of the UK corresponding to the use of coarse language. The University College of London academics investigated patterns of profanity across the country sent from smartphones with their geo-locations switched on.
In the week beginning August 28th, nearly eight percent of tweets which originated from within the Redcar and Cleveland area contained swear words. This was almost double the average figure from across the country, and placed the borough at the top of the list of 'sweariest tweeters'.
According to researchers, the 'f-word' featured in 2.16 percent of Tweets sent from within Redcar and Cleveland. Breaking down the figures further, researchers discovered that the community of Teesville had the biggest number of swearers in the country.
Three regions in Scotland - Clackmannanshire, East Ayreshire and Falkirk - followed Redcar and Cleveland on the profanity scale. In England, Blackburn and Mansfield both scored highly for swear words, as did Rochford in Essex.
Dr Fry said: "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. I think it says something a little more positive perhaps about how aggressive or civil we can be to one another."
Dr Fry added: "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 rather than urban."
