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Analysis of more than 2 million tweets sent to Premier League players found that Cristiano Ronaldo and Harry Maguire received the most abuse.
Cristiano Ronaldo and Harry Maguire have received the most abuse on Twitter among Premier League players, a new report has found.
Around 68 per cent of Premier League footballers were subjected to abuse on Twitter in the first half of last season, according to a report by the regulator Ofcom.
Eight of the 10 players who received the most abuse were with Manchester United at the time. Portugal legend Ronaldo received 12,520, United and England defender Maguire was sent 8,954.
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 season. They found that almost 60,000 were abusive.
The other six United players in the top 10 were Marcus Rashford, Bruno Fernandes, Fred, Jesse Lingard, Paul Pogba and David de Gea. Only Harry Kane (Tottenham) and Jack Grealish (Manchester City) were not playing for the Old Trafford club.
As a club, Tottenham players had the highest percentage of total tweets that were abusive, 3.7 per cent.
The study used new technology that can decipher whether tweets are abusive.
Nearly three-quarters of Premier League footballers received abusive messages, with some receiving daily abuse.
The study 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.
"These findings shed light on a dark side to the beautiful game," Ofcom group director for broadcasting and online content Kevin Bakhurst said. "Online abuse has no place in sport, nor in wider society, and tackling it requires a team effort."
However, he added: "Our research shows the vast majority of online fans behave responsibly, and as the new season kicks off we're asking them to report unacceptable, abusive posts whenever they see them."
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.
A Twitter spokesperson said it was committed to combating abuse.
"As acknowledged in the report, this type of research is only possible because our public API (Application Programming Interface) is open and accessible to all.
"However, our publicly accessible API does not take into account the range of safeguards we put in place, so this does not completely reflect the user experience."
With agencies
