As football fans prepare for start of the new Premier League season this weekend, Ofcom has revealed the scale of personal attacks and abuse suffered by Premier League footballers every day on Twitter.
Ofcom, which is preparing to regulate tech giants under the Online Safety Bill, expected to be passed by early 2023, teamed up with The Alan Turing Institute to carry out the analysis. They used a new machine-learning technology that automatically scanned more than 2.3m tweets directed at players in the first five months of the 2021/22 season and identified abusive tweets. A team of human experts was also on hand to manually review more than 3,000 tweets from the same period.
While the analysis did conclude that most fans are respectful in their tweeting, even if critical, it still found that around 3.5 per cent of tweets by human analysis, and 2.6 per cent by machine analysis, qualified as abusive. These are low numbers, but given the popularity of the Premier League on Twitter it still amounted to 362 tweets every day, or almost 60,000 over the course of the study – one every four minutes. Around one in 12 personal attacks (8.6 per cent) targeted a victim’s protected characteristic, such as their race or gender.
Shockingly, 50 per cent of all the abuse recorded was directed at just 12 players, with the Man Utd duo of Cristiano Ronaldo and Harry Maguire topping that particular unwelcome table. Maguire’s most-abused day saw him receive 2,903 abusive messages on November 7, 2021 – the day after Manchester United were defeated 2-0 at home by City rivals Man City. These 12 players received on average 15 abusive tweets every single day.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the rest of the league escaped online abuse. Over the period, 68 per cent of players (418 out of 618) received at least one abusive tweet, and seven per cent received abuse daily.
Ofcom also surveyed the Twitter-using public, and found that among those who followed football 37 per cent had seen online abuse directed at footballers. This figure was even higher, at 42 per cent, among fans of the women’s game.
Kevin Bakhurst, Ofcom’s group director for broadcasting and online content, said: “These findings shed light on a dark side to the beautiful game. Online abuse has no place in sport, nor in wider society, and tackling it requires a team effort. When we become the regulator for online safety, tech companies will have to be really open about the steps they’re taking to protect users. We will expect them to design their services with safety in mind.”
Bakhurst added that it’s not just the regulators job to tackle abuse: “Supporters can also play a positive role in protecting the game they love,” he said. “Our research shows the vast majority of online fans behave responsibly, and as the new season kicks off we’re asking them to report unacceptable, abusive posts whenever they see them.”
For the purposes of the research, an abusive tweet was defined as one which “threatens, insults, derogates, dehumanises, mocks or belittles a player. This can be implicit or explicit, and includes attacks against their identity. We include use of slurs, negative stereotypes and excessive use of profanities.”
