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The BBC found that more than 2,000 extremely abusive social media posts were sent in a single weekend of Premier League and Women’s Super League action.
As someone with roughly two hours per day scrolling X – no, I’m not proud of it – I’m fully aware of just how rife with abuse ‘Football Twitter’ is.
While much of the self-proclaimed community is based on good hearted fun, primarily laughing in the faces of frustrated rivals after a negative result, there is a minority of so-called supporters that take things too far and stoop to unnecessary abuse.
A recent analysis conducted by data science company Signify and the BBC revealed that more than 2,000 abusive messages including death threats, rape threats, racism, and homophobia were posted online in a single weekend of Premier League and Women’s Super League fixtures.
This sample included just 10 Premier League matches and 6 WSL matches between the 8th and 9th November. Roughly 82% of abusive messages were discovered on X while 15% were found on Instagram, and a total of 61% were traceable to accounts from the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
Premier League bosses Ruben Amorim (Manchester United), Arne Slot (Liverpool), and Eddie Howe (Newcastle) were the most common targets in the men’s top flight, while Chelsea Women and their manager Sonia Bompastor received 50% of abuse in the WSL.
Just 39 of the messages collated were deemed serious enough to warrant further investigation, including reporting to football clubs for the identification of offenders and possible referral to law enforcement. This process was followed for one message, but police dismissed it as being under their threshold for further action.
Alarmingly, a paltry 37 posts flagged on X were removed from the platform and Meta has taken down a single post – asserting that many more remain ‘under investigation’ a month after the fact.
Suffice to say the UK’s Online Safety Act isn’t quite proving fit for purpose, considering one of its major remits is to hold social media platforms accountable for illicit content with the potential to cause harm, such as threats, harassment, or hate speech. Despite this newfound statutory duty, Signify chief executive Jonathan Hirshler says that online abuse is rising ‘25% year-on-year.’
