Guardian Australia analysis reveals politicians who receive most abuse are overwhelmingly from the Coalition

George Christensen, the MP for Dawson in northern Queensland, has received more abuse on Twitter over the past two-and-a-half months than any other Australian politician, new analysis shows.

Guardian Australia analysed all tweets mentioning lower-house Australian politicians since March 24, which includes the election campaign and month leading up to it. This analysis reveals that those who receive the most abuse are overwhelmingly from the Coalition.

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At the top of the list is Christensen, who represents Mackay to Townsville, with 7.45% of more than 1,430 tweets to or about him containing offensive language. Many of the abusive tweets related to Christensen’s comments on the Safe Schools program, such as one tweet: “So you think an anti-bullying program should be cut you fat, ignorant c@nt? (Stooping to your level).”

Just behind him was Stuart Robert, with 7% abusive tweets out of 637. Many of the tweets followed a now-deleted tweet by Robert on Anzac day that said: “There are more defence force personnel that use negative gearing than surgeons, judges, anaesthetists and psychiatrists combined.”

Andrew Wilkie, Bob Katter, Christian Porter, Clive Palmer, Peter Dutton, Greg Hunt, Barnaby Joyce, Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, Andrew Nikolic, Josh Frydenberg, Chris Bowen and Craig Laundy round out the top 15 with 2% or more of all mentions abusive. There were no female MPs in the top 20.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Malcolm Turnbull was the most-mentioned MP, with more than double the mentions of Bill Shorten over the same period – but 1.3% of tweets to Turnbull and just below 1% of the tweets to Shorten contained offensive language.

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Facebook comments on politicians’ public pages over the same time frame were also analysed by Guardian Australia but revealed little abuse. This may be due to the ability of Facebook page owners to moderate comments on their page.

ABC television host Leigh Sales on Thursday began sharing examples of the “disgusting, sexist and relentless abuse” she has received on Twitter during the election campaign, prompting other journalists to follow suit.

Sales shared a “tiny sample” of the abusive messages she’d received with her 235,000 followers on Twitter on Thursday morning before her interview with the Labor leader, Bill Shorten. One of his supporters had tweeted that “some around Bill [Shorten] ... WILL make [her] pay”.

“Let me call out the river of disgusting, sexist and relentless abuse I’ve on Twitter during this campaign with a handful of examples,” she continued on Friday, before retweeting some messages she’d been tagged in, some only hours old.

Leigh Sales (@leighsales) A tiny sample of the flood of bullying and abuse I've had during the campaign https://t.co/RVOM576Exk

“I’d rather watch dog turd turn white than watch @abc730 and @leighsales – disgraceful ‘journalism’,” tweeted one.

A Twitter account with the name Peter Deane, stated to be of Wyoming on the central coast, tweeted a doctored image to show Sales in bed with Turnbull, with the caption: “My prediction for 7.33pm tonight.”

Asked for comment by Guardian Australia, the account tweeted: “If you have to ask, you are completely missing the point, and I won’t be able to help you.”

Another tweet Sales shared began with the caveat “don’t want to sound rude” then implied she was “sleeping with an insider” in Canberra. It had been retweeted 16 times.

Sales declined to comment further to Guardian Australia.

Her perceived bias towards the Liberal party was a recurring theme of the abuse, with even users who condemned the abuse suggesting that that was the reason for it.

“There is no excuse for abuse,” one user replied to her status. “That is a separate issue to your measurable bias towards #libs.”

“if u can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen Leigh,” replied one, who told another user that Sales herself “thinks nothing of venomous behaviour”. The example he gave was her “tersely telling Shorten” to “wrap up”.

Brendan Maclean (@macleanbrendan) @stevethompson49 @leighsales Wait THAT is how you replied to this status????

In solidarity with Sales, the Herald Sun’s political reporter, Annika Smethurst, shared an example of some of the messages she and her colleague, Ellen Whinnett, had received.

Annika Smethurst (@annikasmethurst) Inspired by @leighsales calling out her trolls, here's some abuse the Herald Sun's political reporters are copping pic.twitter.com/TNvHzDBqTA

“This individual singled out the female reporters on the story only, not our male colleague,” Whinnett clarified.

Methods

All tweets mentioning Australian lower house MPs were logged using the Twitter API from 24 March onwards. The Twitter API does not retrieve all tweets where there is a significantly high volume of tweets so in some cases this may be a sub-sample of the total mentions.

Tweets were filtered into those that contained abusive words, and those that didn’t. While this will include false positives in the case of tweets primarily directed at one politician but containing abuse directed at another, these are in the minority.