A STUDY has revealed that North Ayrshire Twitter users are among the most likely to swear in their posts.

A BBC investigation of the social media site found North Ayrshire made the top 10 of sweary tweets by UK local authority area.

Researchers from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London monitored all geo-located tweets sent from smartphones in the UK.

The findings, taken from 28 August to 4 September, showed Redcar and Cleveland to be the UK’s most profane area.

North Ayrshire came 10th – lagging well behind the coarse Twitterati in neighbouring East Ayrshire, which came third.

The study, for BBC Radio 4’s Future Proofing programme, took into account more than 1.3 million tweets across the week - which included football’s transfer-deadline day.

The biggest peak for coarse language followed Arsenal’s signing of Manchester United forward Danny Welbeck at about 9pm on Monday, September 1.

Other spikes in swearing came on Saturday and Sunday afternoons during football matches.

On weekdays, profane tweets were found to be more concentrated in the mornings – when people were getting ready for work -– at lunchtime and at the end of the working day.

Monday at 5pm saw a particularly high percentage of tweets containing swear words, as people posted about the pressures of their jobs.

At the other end of the scale, the Orkney Islands had the cleanest tweets. Oxford was the lowest ranked area of the mainland UK.

Dr Hannah Fry, one of the researchers behind the study, suggested 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.” Dr Fry was also surprised that only 4.2 per cent of all tweets surveyed contained any kind of profanity, especially considering that those posting tweets on their smartphones were likely to be young.

She said: “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.”