The study found Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo, the Manchester United striker, was the most abused on Twitter last season in the English Premier League.
About 68 per cent of Premier League players were abused on Twitter in the first half of last season, according to a report released on Tuesday by British media regulator Ofcom.
And Ofcom, in a study conducted with Britain’s Alan Turing National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence using new auto-recognition technology, found that nearly 60,000 of the more than 2.3 million tweets were sent to football players. . in the English Premier League last year The first five months of the season (2021-22) were offensive.
The study found that 418 of the 618 players analyzed received at least one offensive “tweet”, with eight percent of the insults targeting protected characteristics such as race or origin.
About half of the offensive messages were addressed to 12 specific players, who received an average of 15 offensive “tweets” per day.
Ronaldo received 12,520 offensive tweets, while Maguire received 8,954 tweets and English striker Marcus Rashford, also a Manchester United striker, was third with 2,557 tweets.
Eight Manchester United players have made it into the top ten.
Tottenham Hotspur striker Harry Kane, captain of the England national team, and Jack Grealish, Manchester City’s player, were the only duo outside of Manchester United in the top ten.
At club level, Tottenham players had the highest percentage of total offensive tweets at 3.7%.
“These harsh results show just how vulnerable footballers are to social media abuse,” said Dr. Bertie Widgen, lead author of the report and head of online security at the Alan Turing Institute.
“While the fight against online abuse is difficult, we cannot leave it unattended. More needs to be done to stop the worst forms of content so players can do their jobs without being abused.”
However, it wasn’t all bad news. 57 percent of all tweets were positive towards players.
In response, the BBC quoted a Twitter spokesperson as welcoming the study, but said the company had implemented a number of security features to prevent such messages from falling into people’s hands.
Source: agencies