OUR local MPs were among the least ‘abused’ on Twitter according to a survey carried out by the Local Democracy Reporting Service’s Shared Data Unit.

The service said: ‘We have analysed 3 million tweets mentioning MPs over a six-week period to find out just how much of that could be classed as abuse.

‘In one of the largest studies of its kind, we used machine learning to rate each tweet for ‘toxicity’.

‘We found:

More than 130,000 tweets mentioning MPs were considered likely to be toxic and 20,000 severely toxic.

‘Stupid’ and ‘pathetic’ were the two most commonly used adjectives in those tweets.

Female MPs were more likely to be called ‘thick’ and ‘ignorant’ and be subject to sexualised language while their male counterparts were more likely to be called ‘liars’.

All 20 of the MPs to receive the most abuse proportionally were not members of the cabinet or shadow cabinet.

One user sent 128 toxic-rated tweets to male MPs and 85 to female MPs during the time period.

Conservative MPs were nearly twice as likely as a Labour MP to receive a tweet classed as severely toxic.

However, the number crunchers found that Newton Abbot MP Anne Marie Morris received only one tweet that was described as ‘toxic’ out of 187 that were analysed. This gave her what they described as a ‘toxic percentage’ of 0.5 per cent, one of the lowest of all MPs.

Central Devon MP Mel Stride received a ‘toxic total’ of 15 messages out of the 554 analysed, giving him a ‘toxic percentage’ of 2.7 per cent.

The most ‘abused’ MP was Mansfield’s Conservative MP Ben Bradley with a ‘toxic total of 654 out of 4,827 tweets, giving him a ‘toxic percentage’ of 13.5 per cent.

Former Prime Minister Liz Truss had a ‘toxic percentage’ of 5.1 per cent with a total of 5,642 toxic tweets out of 111,382.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had a ‘toxic percentage’ of 4.7 per cent with a ‘toxic total’ of 9,285 out of 195,791 tweets.

Another former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, had a 3.8 per cent ‘toxic percentage’ with 18,907 toxic tweets out of 502,937.