Former Blackpool and PNE player condemns abuse in football
Clarke Carlisle suffered abuse personally before becoming Chairman of the PFA
Last updated 2nd Aug 2022
Around 68 per cent of Premier League footballers were subjected to abuse on Twitter in the first half of last season, according to an Ofcom report.
The regulator teamed up with the The Alan Turing Institute - UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence - to analyse more than 2.3 million tweets sent to top-flight players during the first five months of the 2021-22 campaign and found that almost 60,000 were abusive.
It revealed 418 of the 618 players analysed received at least one abusive tweet, with eight per cent of the abuse aimed at a protected characteristic, such as their race or gender.
Around half of the abusive messages were targeted at 12 specific players, who received on average 15 abusive tweets every day.
Preston-born Clarke Carlisle played for Blackpool and PNE before being elected head of the PFA (Professional Footballers Association.)
He said:
"The introduction and inception of social media was initially seen as one of the greatest ways to bridge that gap between supporters, fans and players, but when that gap is bridged there will be some who use that facility to abuse players.
"Pre-social media when you were able to leave the stadium, leave the training ground and go home, you had the ability to switch off and place boundaries between those interactions. Since the introduction of social media, that's no longer there.
"This report holds no surprise for me. It's just one more piece of data that proves something taht i've experienced personally and we see happen on a daily basis."
The study used new technology that can decipher whether tweets are abusive, while 3,000 random tweets were also manually reviewed. Of those 3,000 tweets, over half were positive, 27 per cent were neutral, 12.5 per cent were critical and 3.5 per cent were abusive.
Twitter was chosen due to its popularity with players, previous history of abuse and because it makes data available for research.
However, the Application Programming Interface (API) does not take into account the safeguards put in place.
Ofcom is preparing to regulate tech companies under new Online Safety laws, which will introduce rules for sites, apps, search engines and messaging platforms aimed at protecting users.
Twitter says it's engaging in focus groups with football partners to work on ways to reduce abuse.