Islamophobic tweets 'peaked in July', BBC data suggests

Almost 7,000 "Islamophobic" tweets were sent, in English, every day in July worldwide, data seen by the BBC suggests.

In comparison, 2,500 of the same kind of tweets were tweeted in April. Peaks were recorded following the Nice lorry attack and the attempted military coup in Turkey.

According to the BBC, 49 words and hashtags were used as indicators of anti-Islamic tweets by the think tank Demos.

Demos analysed tweets recorded between March and July, and judged there to be 215,247 tweets - sent in English - that were "highly likely" to be anti-Islamic, derogatory or hateful.

The vast majority of tweets that could be located to Europe came from the United Kingdom, with other concentrations in the Netherlands, France and Germany.

The highest number of "Islamophobic" tweets to be sent in one day, 21,190, came on 15 July - the day after a man ploughed a lorry into crowds on the seafront in Nice, killing 85 people. Jihadist group Daesh claimed one of its followers carried out the attack.

Other peaks came on 17 July, the day after an attempted coup in Turkey, in which 10,610 such tweets were sent, and on 26 July - the day a Catholic priest was murdered by terrorists in a church in the French city of Rouen. Daesh subsequently claimed the church attackers had pledged allegiance to them.

Higher numbers of anti-Islamic tweets were also seen in the days following a Daesh-claimed suicide attack on the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, that claimed more than 250 lives on 3 July - with 9,220 such posts on 5 July - and the day after shootings in Dallas, US, in which five police officers were killed. The gunman, Micah Xavier Johnson, was not a Muslim.

Carl Miller, a research director at the left-of-centre think tank, said the tweets were worrying as they were examples not of people "being angry at Daesh, [but] people who are being angry at the wider Muslim world."