Abusive tweets targeting MPs doubled in the wake of the Manchester and London Bridge terror attacks, according to new analysis by BuzzFeed News and the University of Sheffield that reveals for the first time the scale of abuse faced by politicians on Twitter during the general election campaign.



The research covered 840,000 tweets and suggests that the amount of abuse in the run-up to the snap election was heavily influenced by news events, with abusive tweets to MPs soaring in the wake of the two terrorist attacks.

It also found that:

Women candidates were more likely to receive gendered abusive words like "witch".



Jeremy Corbyn was the politician who received the highest amount of abusive messages on Twitter during the campaign.



The overwhelming majority of insulting tweets were targeted at a relatively small number of prominent politicians.



When the findings were broken down by party and gender, male Conservative candidates were the group receiving the highest percentage of abuse in their Twitter mentions.



The government has announced an inquiry into the abuse, both online and offline, that politicians faced during the general election, following a debate in Westminster in which MPs detailed the abuse they and their staff had faced. One MP said this was "driving people out of politics altogether," but others have countered that the debate risks labelling all criticism of politicians as "abusive".



BuzzFeed News worked with researchers at the University of Sheffield to analyse tweets sent in replies to a wide range of politicians. The politicians included candidates standing for major parties who have a known Twitter profile, plus a small number of other prominent politicians who were not standing as candidates.

The analysis focused on tweets using obscene nouns ("cunt", "twat", etc), racist or otherwise bigoted language, milder insults ("you idiot", "coward"), and words that can be threats ("kill", "rape"). Obscene language more generally ("fucking", "bloody") was not counted as abusive as it was less likely to be targeted at the MP personally.

Here is what we found: