Kick It Out urges action on social media abuse of Premier League players

Kick It Out urges action on social media abuse of Premier League players

David Conn at the Guardian:

An enormous volume of racist, homophobic, sexist and other discriminatory abuse of Premier League footballers and clubs on social media has been revealed in new research for the game’s anti-discrimination organisation, Kick It Out.

The search of Twitter, Facebook, supporters’ forums and blogs, using key abusive terms with players’ and club names, refined to identify direct abuse, found 134,400 discriminatory posts this season, from August 2014 to last month.

The research has also highlighted the huge number of abusive posts received by some individual black players, finding that Mario Balotelli, of Liverpool, was sent more than 8,000 discriminatory posts on social media, of which more than half were racist. Danny Welbeck, who moved from Manchester United to Arsenal in September, received 1,700 abusive posts, exactly half involving racism. Daniel Sturridge was sent about 1,600 discriminatory posts, more than 60% abusing him on the grounds of sexual orientation.