A large study of tweets across the country has revealed that Oxford is the politest area on the mainland, and behind only the Shetland Islands and the Orkneys nationally. Slightly less than 1.4% of tweets from Oxford contain swearing. Also in the top five politest areas were Westminster and Kensington, and Chelsea.
The two areas with the highest amount of swearing recorded were Redcar and Cleveland in North Yorkshire, and Clackmannanshire in Scotland. Accordig to the study in both areas over 7% of tweets contained swearing.
The research was conducted by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London. CASA monitored 1.3 million geo-located tweets sent from smartphones in the UK between August 28 and September 4.
Dr Hannah Fry expressed surprise that only 4.2% of tweets in the UK contained swearing. She commented for the BBC, “Twitter has a reputation for being really the home of angry, aggressive messages that people send each other. I think it says something a little more positive perhaps about how aggressive or civil we can be to one another.”
The results also showed that swearing is most common during Saturday and Sunday afternoons due to football matches, and also at 17:00 on Monday because of people complaining about job pressure. The biggest single surge in swearing was around 21.00 on Monday 1st September following Arsenal’s signing of Manchester United forward Danny Welbeck.
The study was commissioned for the BBC radio 4 program Future Proofing.
