Male celebs get more abuse on Twitter

Male celebrities get more Twitter abuse than women, but men are also more likely to hurl abuse, a study shows.

A two-week study of 2,006,616 tweets sent to some high-profile and widely-followed public figures on Twitter shows that 5.19% of those sent to male celebrities included abuse, compared to 1.37% aimed at female celebrities.

The think tank Demos and academics from the University of Sussex developed software which looked at the accounts of celebrities, politicians, journalists and musicians, which were equally split between male and female famous faces. They ranged from journalist Piers Morgan through to singers Rita Ora and Jessie J, plus former cabinet minister Baroness Warsi.