Women are responsible for half of all misogynistic Tweets using the words "slut and whore", a new study has found.

The study, performed by respected UK think tank Demos, monitored UK Twitter over three weeks and found that found 6,500 unique users were targeted by 10,000 misogynistic and aggressive Tweets.

50 per cent of the aggressors were women.

Internationally, over 200,000 Tweets using these terms were sent to 80,000 people in the same three weeks.

The research monitored use of the words "slut" and "whore" used in an explicitly aggressive way.

Special natural language-filtering algorithms were able to separate out Tweets using these terms as obvious abuse, from instances of "self-identification, and those that were more conversational in tone or commenting on issues related to misogyny (ie. referring to ‘slut shaming’, ‘slut walks’)," Demos' study said.

“This study provides a birds-eye snapshot of what is ultimately a very personal and often traumatic experience for women," said Alex Krasodomski-Jones, a Demos researcher involved in the study.