Tennis' Online Abuse Problem Continues

French player and popular figure on tour, Caroline Garcia, relaxing at her tour hotel in Times Square, after her first-round 2024 U.S. Open. match.

“You should consider (shooting) yourself,” reads an post with an emoji gun; I hope your mom dies soon; a clown belongs in the circus; and I hope with everything in my heart that something bad happens to you.” These are the types of sentiments that come through the phone of French professional tennis player Caroline Garcia after nearly every professional match she plays

“F**king Muslim terrorist; I’m gonna kill you; f**k you, you die of cancer; I hope you die in an accident.”German-born Lebanese tennis player Benjamin Hassan, 29, a , newly minted Olympian and the first singles tennis player to ever represent Lebanon in the international contest, reads sentences like these regularly, despite reaching a career-high ATP No. 143 in 2024 and notching wins over big names such as Christopher Eubanks and Dominik Koepfer.

“I promise to find you and destroy your leg so hard that you can't walk anymore,” are the sorts of messages that turns up on Sloane Stephens’ social media, in addition to numerous monkey emojis, after high-profile matches. She sometimes glances at more than 2,000 of them.

“I’m just a normal girl working really hard and trying my best, I have tools and have done work to protect myself from this hate. But still, this is not ok,” Garcia wrote on her Instagram after a first round loss to Renata Zarazúa 6-1, 6-4 in the first round of the U.S. Open. “It really worries me when I think about younger players coming up, that have to go through this. People that still haven’t yet developed fully as a human and that really might be affected by this hate.

Benjamin Hassan, 29, a , newly minted Olympian and the first singles tennis player to ever represent Lebanon in the international contest, gets called a “terrorist”

”Social media platforms don’t prevent it, despite AI being in a very advanced position. Tournaments and the sport keeps partnering with betting companies, which keep attracting new people to unhealthy betting… if someone decided to say this things to me in public, he could have legal issues. So why online we are free to do anything? Shouldn’t we reconsider anonymity online?”

Online shaming and abuse in sport has been prevalent since nearly the advent of Twitter in 2006, but in the summer of 2021, following England’s penalty-shootout loss to Italy in the UEFA European Championship, a torrent of online racial epithets prevailed — as did crackdowns by the UK government. Tennis players have brought up similar maltreatment, but largely choose to focus on fans and tournaments and business-as-usual. But during the first round of the U.S. Open, Garcia raised the subject publicly again, which was met by echoes of similar revelations over the next few days.

U.S. Open News: With the semifinals set, Autumn is in the air, but so is excitement, as two new U.S. Open champions will be crowned, with every New Yorkers hoping for Americans. There’s a good chance of that, with red hot Emma Navarro first facing WTA No. 2 Aryna Sabalenka, the only Grand Slam winner left in the draw. Later tonight, the top-ranked American Jessica Pegula, who has been on a win streak, faces the 2023 French Open finalist, Karolína Muchová, who lost in the 2023 semis to eventual champion Coco Gauff. All of them seek a first kiss of the Tiffany-crafted trophy.

On the men’s end, good friends and doubles partners Jack Draper and Jannik Sinner procured their tickets to the Final Four yesterday after beating Alex De Minaur and 2021 champion Daniil Medvedev, respectively, which brings the absolutism of a new men’s champion, as well. At the other side, compatriots and buddies Frances Tiafoe and Taylor Fritz have set up an all-American US Open semifinal after Fritz defeated a morose and unmotivated Alexander Zverev and Tiafoe outlasted veteran player Grigor Dimitrov, who suffered an injury and retired in their fourth set. There will be a home men’s finalist for the first time since 2006 when Andy Roddick. was defeated by Roger Federer. Roddick remains the last American man to capture a Grand Slam when he claimed the 2003 US Open and he cannot wait to relinquish the honor. “I want it to all end… to go away,” Roddick said on his weekly podcast series, “Served with Andy Roddick” for the Tennis Channel. “I’ve gotten more juice out of this squeeze than any human ever.

“I would love nothing more than for an American to win on Sunday — that would just fill my cup up… I get this anxious feeling every time they have to answer for (not winning a U.S. Open title in 21 years). I fucking hate it for them. And frankly speaking, if someone breaks it, they could start contending for (the U.S. Open title) regularly.”

A 23-year-old Andy Roddick hoisting the 2003 U.S. Open trophy. He is the last American man to win the Tiffany cup. He reached the French Open final three times, but never took home the La Coupe des Mousquetaires (The Musketeers' Trophy)

Back to the Story: In 2022, AI company Signify Group conducted a study for tournament directors of Wimbledon found that one in four tennis stars were subject to online abuse after monitoring more than 1.6 million Tweets and 19,000 Instagram comments sent to 454 players — with 546 offensive posts from 438 accounts. For the first time in 2024, the tournament directors used Signify Group’s Threat Matrix tool to crackdown on online abuse against players. ““If we’ve got anything that we think is a concern or worth flagging, ultimately it’s engaging with the player and then you deal with the next steps on that,” Jamie Baker, the former tournament director told The Guardian. “The benefit of having it is that you do have the ability to officially register what is going on with the right people there.”

In 2023, the French Open also took action, collaborating with another AI tool called Bodyguard, which moderates hateful responses in realtime — or less than 200 milliseconds, according the FFT, or the French Tennis Federation. Women, on the whole, receive more online vitriol than their male counterparts — the top six female seeds at the French Open received 8.6 percent negative sentiment on average compared to the 8.3 percent of the men. Among those, reigning Australian Open champion Aryna Sabalenka got the most negative feedback with 15 percent on Twitter and five per cent of Facebook reaction posts registering “angry”, while one in five of Tweets referencing Novak Djokovic’s Tweets were “angry”.

Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina and Garcia have a 10 percent negative sentiment on X while world No 1 and three-time Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek has a seven percent negative post rate on X with Coco Gauff at five per cent. “You hear a lot of nasty things, and people talk about your appearance, your family's appearance and all these things," Gauff said at the U.S. Open. “If you are already struggling with your own mental issues and, on top of that, you have people digging deeper, it is tough.”

In 2020, the DraftKings All-American Team Cup became the first tennis event in the U.S. to take place during the coronavirus epidemic. Online sports betting by companies is a key player in the perpetration of online abuse against tennis players.

When it comes to global betting popularity, no sport touches football (soccer), but tennis consistently ranks as one of the most bet-on games in the world. With hundreds of players competing in large draws nearly every week over the course of 11 months, the sheer volume of wagering options that tennis provides makes it a natural for gambling. At an overall value of $3 trillion, around 12 percent of bookmaker revenue comes from tennis — up to 18 different markets per match, ranging from winner odds to serve and forehand percentages. People who lose money often focus their vitriol on players.

Social media also removes the checks and balances of traditional media, as well as the face-to-face interaction, that might have once set parameters on abusive types. Lastly, while social media can help tennis players, it can sexualize them or infantilize them and make them targets when they reject a perpetrator, according to a 2015 University of Bournemouth study on the social media attention that Maria Sharapova received during Wimbledon.

Another study by Loughborough University in the UK on behalf of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), showed that social media posts included primarily hateful, discriminatory and emotional forms of harassment, especially towards female athletes. “Our research confirmed that online abuse towards athletes… can have long-lasting damaging effects on them,” said Andrea Geurin, the director of the Institute for Sport Business, Loughborough University London. “Meanwhile, sport organisations and governing bodies are struggling to keep up with this abuse from a safeguarding perspective.” Academics have suggested that sport organisations can improve their safeguarding by developing harm reduction policies emphasising responsibility, collaboration, education, and responsiveness.

Maria Sharapova peeking inside the U.S. Open cup after winning it in 2006. The online harassment she received was studied by a UK university during her 2015 Wimbledon run.

The likes of Djokovic, Federer and even Felix Auger-Aliassime have social media managers to edit out and respond to the messages they receive; the rest don’t.Many athletes, like Sherapova, seemingly brush off the abuse and move forward. But they actually don’t. Beyond fears of physical violence stemming from the threats, athletes can experience not only performance anxiety, but also, sleeplessness and over all distress. In 2013, 22-year-old Canadian tennis player Rebecca Marino quit, unable to cope with fans “berating” her on social media.

Rebecca Marino, then a 22-year-old tennis player from Canada, quit professional tennis due to her inability to cope with fans “berating” her on social media.

To deal with the added pressure, professional tours have put together support networks for players affected by such abuse, including ITF- and WTA-run counselling programmes. ATP University, which is designed to help tennis players with all aspects of their careers, held a class on assisting players with social media abuse, according to Romanian doubles player Florin Mergea. “If it gets really bad, they told us to report it to the Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU) who will take it from there,” he told VICE media in 2016. But players are sceptical that the TIU, which has its hands full investigating gamesmanship and thrown matches, takes them seriously.

Other associations have stood with football in ending the hate. Even before the Euros fiasco, England’s Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) participated in a weekend-long social media blackout to “demonstrate our collective anger at the constant abuse on social media received by professional athletes, as well as others across the world, which goes without any real-world consequences for perpetrators.” The LTA has called on social media companies for such measures as preventative filtering and blocking; effective verification of users, real-life consequences for online discriminatory abuse and warning messages for would-be abusers to stop before they send.

Lastly, many players, including Hassan and American Taylor Townsend, have started engaging with watchdog tech companies, such as Sportradar, which uses Facebook and Instagram handles to locate the details of perpetrators and pass them on to police. Investigators in six different locators have contacted abusers, although all await legal action.

In the meantime, athletes such as Rogers, Stephens, Hassan and other will likely adapt the “very avid block, delete and report” approach of Townsend.”This whole year, we've been really talking and diving into a lot of issues that make people extremely uncomfortable and I think this is one that is a part of sport that we do need to address,” she concluded.

Player Taylor Townsend will pose for selfies with fans, but vows to actively “block, delete and report” any social media abusers.

Things we love: New Yorkers turning the stands at Arthur Ashe into Studio 54. While the players are not enjoying the night matches, some of the fans surely are:

Things we find annoying: The 2024 U.S. Open poster. While the 2023 poster celebrates 50 years of women’s professional tennis with a masterstroke Billie Jean King, the 2024 poster is a bit… abstract on the way in which it venerates tennis.

Special thanks to RALLY ambassador, Noah Rubin, for his support in discovering and creating a new way for New Yorkers to book courts and play tennis in the world’s favorite city.