Social media can be a great outlet for teams and athletes to grow their fan base. Many athletes, however, especially female athletes, are the target of persistent toxic comments. With a noticeable increase in negative social media related to women’s football, Visa, sponsor of the UEFA Women’s Champion League final, has enlisted England national football and Chelsea star, Lauren James, as the spokesperson for their campaign to drown out the hate with powerful messages of support.
According to Dr. Lauren Burch who studies digital and social media communication and marketing within the sport industry. “Online abuse is a widespread issue, not just in sport but across the professional world. There are deeper rooted issues in the online communication process, where gendered structures within sport and perceived anonymity makes people less inhibited to post abusive or hateful messages.”
Visa, the first ever UEFA sponsor dedicated to women’s football in 2018, conducted their own research on social media abuse related to women’s football. Their findings show that nearly one in ten (9%) of online comments over the last international tournaments were hateful – equating to over 38,000 posts across the UK, France, and Spain.
James’s personal experience with toxic comments motivated her to spearhead this initiative. She recently shared with me, “unfortunately, it’s happened to me too often and will continue to happen until people talk openly about it.”
Read the full article on Forbes.com.
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