Cristiano Ronaldo And Harry Maguire The Most Abused Players In The Premier League, New Study Finds.
According to a recent study, Cristiano Ronaldo and Harry Maguire of Manchester United received the most Twitter criticism of any Premier League players last season.
Together, Ofcom and the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national data science and AI institute, examined 2.3 million tweets that were posted during the first part of the 2021–22 campaign.
According to the survey, during the first five months of the previous season, approximately 60,000 offensive posts were addressed against Premier League players.
Seven out of ten players in the top division were the targets of abusive tweets, with just 12 individuals—eight of them were United players at the time—receiving half of the hate.
The most offensive tweets directed at Ronaldo were sent between August 13 and January 24 and totaled 12,520.
Maguire came in second on the list, receiving 8,954 hostile messages during the same time frame.
In addition to Harry Kane (2,127) and Jack Grealish of England, who are both internationals, Marcus Rashford (2,557), Bruno Fernandes (2,464), Fred (1,924), Jesse Lingard (1,605), Paul Pogba (1,446), and David De Gea (1,394) also appeared in the top 10. (1,538).
🚨 A new report from Ofcom shows Cristiano Ronaldo and Harry Maguire as the most abused Premier League players on Twitter #MUFC @BBCSport 🔴 pic.twitter.com/pG9fFpritw
— UtdPlug (@UtdPlug) August 2, 2022
The frequency of nasty tweets peaked twice, according to the survey.
The first peak occurred on August 27 when Ronaldo returned to United from Juventus, and the second one was on November 7 after Maguire tweeted an apology to the team’s supporters following the 2-0 loss to Manchester City.
But the research also revealed that the vast majority of football supporters behave responsibly on social media.
A team of specialists manually assessed a random sample of 3,000 tweets in addition to using new machine learning technologies to automatically determine if tweets were abusive to increase accuracy.
Out of that smaller sample, 57% of the tweets were supportive of the athletes, 27% were neutral, 12.5 percent were negative, and 3.5% were abusive.
In the meantime, 2.6% of the 2.3 million tweets examined using machine learning were deemed to be abusive.
More must be done to address the issue of online abuse, according to Dr. Bertie Vidgen, the report’s primary author and director of online safety at the Alan Turing Institute.
These startling results show how severely footballers are abused on social media, according to Dr. Vidgen.
“Even if combating internet harassment is challenging, we must do it. The worst types of content must be stopped, so that players can perform their duties free from harassment.”
Twitter has praised the study but argues that it may not have taken into consideration safety measures the firm has put in place to stop users from seeing offensive postings.
According to a spokeswoman quoted by the BBC, “We are committed to preventing abuse and, as described in our Hateful Conduct Policy, we do not accept the abuse or harassment of anybody on the grounds of race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation.”
This kind of research is only possible because our public API is open and available to everyone, as stated in the paper.
However, “this does not fully reflect the user experience because our publicly accessible API does not take into consideration the breadth of precautions we put in place.”
