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The UK's worst area for homophobic, sexist and racist tweets is East Ayrshire, a study has claimed.

Twitter users in East Ayrshire and Midlothian posted more racists comments than anywhere else in the UK.

Dundee topped the table for homophobic tweets, a ranking it shared with Denbighshire, Wales.

Social intelligence company Brandwatch and anti-bullying charity Ditch the Label analysed 19 million tweets from the UK and the US over four years.

Over four years, researchers looked at speech across topics including racial intolerance, misogyny, masculinity construct and homophobia.

Each topic as separated into neutral and supportive discussions, and then analysed for regional variation.

Negative racist discussions were scattered throughout the country with East Ayrshire, Midlothian, North Yorkshire, Blaenau Gwent and Torfaen emerging as most prominent.

Scotland showed the most widespread level of homophobic language, with pockets of hate speech also seen in Wales (Glamorgan, Gwent and neighbouring Herefordshire) and England (East Yorkshire and Peterborough).

Only South Ayrshire and Northamptonshire exhibited high levels of hate speech across all three topics of misogyny, masculinity constructs and homophobia.

Researchers said, aside from these areas, regional distribution of discrimination appeared to be random and inconsistent across topics.

They said this suggested that discrimination across the UK was concentrated within a few regional pockets, and the majority of areas exhibited a more balanced range of views online.