Tracking abuse on Twitter against football players in the 2021-22 Premier League season

Online abuse against football players, and other public figures, is a growing concern. As Ofcom prepares for a new role overseeing online safety, we wanted to understand the problem of online abuse in more detail.

We commissioned The Alan Turing Institute to analyse more than 2.3 million tweets directed at Premier League footballers over the first five months of the 2021-22 season.

This allowed us to examine whether large-scale data analysis and machine learning techniques can shed light on the prevalence and nature of harmful content.

Read the full report: Tracking abuse on Twitter against football players in the 2021-22 Premier League season (PDF, 3.6 MB)