Boulter believes a lot of the abuse she is sent is from people who have placed bets on her matches, given it comes after victories as well as defeats.<\/p>\n
She says she has become better at moving on from it, or simply not looking at her direct messages, but the impact is clear.<\/p>\n
“As far as death threats, it’s just not something you want to be reading straight after an emotional loss,” she says. <\/p>\n
“A lot of the time you get it after you win as well.”<\/p>\n
Statistics shared exclusively with BBC Sport demonstrate the level of abuse aimed at players through social media, and what is being done to try to address it.<\/p>\n
The figures – provided by data science firm Signify, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) – show that in 2024, about 8,000 abusive, violent or threatening messages were sent publicly to 458 tennis players through their social media accounts.<\/p>\n
A significant proportion of abuse stems from betting, according to Signify, which has been working with tennis authorities on detecting abuse through an artificial intelligence-led detection system called Threat Matrix.<\/p>\n
More than a quarter of all abuse (26%) was targeted at five players.<\/p>\n
The most prolific account sent 263 abusive messages, and 15 accounts were escalated to law enforcement.<\/p>\n
Nine of the 10 most prolific accounts – the majority of which were related to angry gamblers – were either suspended or had content removed.<\/p>\n
Details of 39 account holders were shared with the tennis authorities and betting industry for further action.<\/p>\n
Across the year, angry gamblers sent 40% of all detected abuse, with messages clearly related to betting activity because of the timing or content of the abuse.<\/p>\n
Asked for a response, a Betting and Gaming Council spokesperson said its members “do not tolerate abuse on social media, which has no place in betting or sport”.<\/p>\n
It added: “It is vital social media companies take swift action against users, and remove offensive content.”<\/p>\n
Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, declined to provide a comment on the record but has developed various tools to try to prevent people from seeing abuse – including hiding and filtering offensive or unwanted comments or images and technology that tracks and removes abuse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Boulter believes a lot of the abuse she is sent is from people who have placed bets on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191075,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4317],"tags":[105,218,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-203351","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114723170858894685","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}