MALDON MP Sir John Whittingdale has suffered 'toxic' abuse on the social media platform, Twitter, and sits high in a list of vilified members of the House of Commons.

A new survey produced by the BBC's shared data unit shows the level of 'toxic' abuse members of the House of Commons get via Twitter.

The service analysed almost three million Tweets mentioning MPs over a six-week period to find out just how many could be classed as abuse. 

More than 130,000 of the 2.9 million monitored Tweets were deemed to be 'toxic', which is defined as a rude, disrespectful or unreasonable comment that is likely to make someone want to leave a conversation.

There are some shocking numbers in the survey, and while Sir John's numbers of mentions are on the low side the number that are abusive is high. He features in just 450 but 40 of them are 'toxic', of which eight are severely toxic. That percentage of malicious messages comes out at 8.9 per cent.

That rates him as the seventh most abused member in percentage terms.

Priti Patel.

Witham MP and former Home Secretary Priti Patel was mentioned in 159,639 messages. 4,110 were classed as toxic (2.6%), of which 631 were severly toxic.

Percentage wise that put her at 203rd on the list.

The most abused MP in terms of percentage was Mansfield's Ben Bradley with 13.5 per cent of 4,827 Tweets being toxic. He has caused numerous social media storms over his outspoken views over a number of years.

He has been branded an 'evil misogynist' among comments, many in response to his views on free school meals, describing the National Trust as 'woke', speaking out on educational attainment for white working-class boys and calls for a 'Minister for Men'.

The person who received the most toxic Tweets was former Prime Minster Boris Johnson, with 18,907 out of more than half a million messages and it appears abuse goes hand-in-hand with the job. Current PM Rishi Sunak got 9,258 toxic Tweets. Former Prime Minister Liz Truss got 5,642 toxic messages.

Being in opposition doesn't mean you don't get abuse, Labour leader Sir Kier Starmer got 8,109 toxic Tweets out of just more than 200,000 messages.

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