The map of countries who take the least offence

The United Kingdom is not quite as big on free speech as the world-leading United States, according to a global index.

The UK is the tenth most supportive country of free speech, of 37 states surveyed around the world.

Data from the Pew Research Center has found that Americans were the most supportive of free speech, and also of speech offensive to the survey respondents.

In the US, 77 per cent support the right of others to make statements that are offensive to their own religious beliefs - which was the highest score among countries in the study.

The below map shows the overall scores for the Free Expression Index:

The United States was followed by Poland and Spain in the index rankings.

Meanwhile, Senegal came bottom of the index, below Jordan and Pakistan.

The index is formed of average responses to eight survey questions, five about free speech and three about freedom of the press, each answer supportive of freedom of speech being scored as one point and each negative being scored as zero points, creating a scale ranking from zero to eight.

The mean score for countries in the index was 4.07.

More: These are the countries with the least press freedom in the world