Sportswomen facing ‘horrific burden of routine misogynistic attacks and threats’, campaigners say

For Sonay Kartal, there was disappointment but a sense of pride as she walked off Centre Court to a standing ovation when her fairytale Wimbledon run came to an end.

Footage of the bittersweet moment, posted on SW19’s official Facebook page, prompted praise for the 23-year-old British No 3 – and a slew of cruel comments about her appearance.

Campaigners said it was sportswomen “who uniquely face the horrific burden of routine misogynistic attacks and threats” after tennis players including Katie Boulter and Jodie Burrage have spoken out against trolls in recent weeks.

On Wednesday, about 1,000 comments on two of Wimbledon’s Facebook posts about Kartal, who reached the fourth round of a grand slam for the first time, had been deleted. But hateful comments had remained online for at least 24 hours.

A spokesperson for the All England Club said: “Wimbledon’s social analytics tool automatically rates comments by sentiment and flags posts with a high proportion of negativity.

“Our digital team also does a significant amount of manual moderation of comments across all of Wimbledon’s official social channels with the aim of removing inappropriate content as soon as possible.”

The former Wimbledon champion and British No 1 Johanna Konta, 34, said the club should be doing more to delete abusive comments on its accounts. “I think obviously they probably do [delete comments], it’s just there’s always going to be a lag. Unless someone is there constantly with their finger on the trigger. It’s tough,” she added.

“I highly doubt that Wimbledon are not actively looking to make sure that their site is clean and as devoid of abuse as possible. They’re not looking to abuse their own players that’s for sure, but it’s hard; how do you keep it fully clean?”

Wimbledon has an AI-driven social media monitoring service, Threat Matrix, that monitors players’ public-facing social media profiles and automatically flags death threats, racism and sexist comments in 35 different languages. The service is supported by people monitoring the accounts.

Wimbledon said on Wednesday that the Threat Matrix had analysed 150,000 posts to date at this year’s championships. “Just under 10,000 posts have been flagged for human review, of which 2,504 have been risk assessed and triaged for further action – which could include reporting accounts to platforms and security/law enforcement escalation where required,” a spokesperson said.

Stephanie Hilborne, the chief executive of the charity Women in Sport, said social media companies should become far stricter in blocking the accounts of those who promote misogyny. “Currently they don’t even list misogyny as a reason for reporting harmful content. There should be a zero-tolerance approach,” she said.

“Nor is it appealing to young girls and women to see your heroes subjected to this hate. Seeing this kind of attack is hardly going to inspire you to make it to the top; there is still a dream gap with only 38% of girls dreaming of becoming top athletes, compared to 59% of boys.”

Naomi Broady, 35, the former world No 76, said all players received hate but women were subjected to misogynistic abuse. The 35-year-old and she also refused to show the faces of her twin sons online because of the ugly side of social media.

“I think the WTA [Women’s Tennis Association] do try to do what they can, but I think it has to come from the social media platforms,” she said. “If they have algorithms that are able to prevent the spreading of misinformation … why can they not do it for the abuse as well?”

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