Cristiano Ronaldo and Harry Maguire most abused players on Twitter

It is a disgrace that most of the United fanbase detest the United Captain. I dont think it ever happened.
 
So saying a player such as Maguire has no place in the team as he moves slower than a wardrobe and shouldn't be captain of the club would be considered 'belittling' and therefore, abuse?

I imagine it would be considered pretty mild abuse. But, yes, if you say that directly to someone - sure, that's abuse: I mean, it's not objective criticism, is it? It's hyperbolic and insulting.

Would you offer that as "criticism" to someone face to face? I'm guessing you would not. So - you shouldn't post it on Twitter either.
 
Harry gets jeered a lot by fans of other clubs like he shouldn't be playing for England or United in their minds, they could be correct but it's become silly.

I don't recall so many fanbases of other clubs all singing about one manager like they did with Ole. People have a vested interest of United whether they like us or not and I think we can all see now just how bad Ole and the overall running of the club is.
 
Not sure about Twitter, but Harry is absolutely battered on Facebook and Instagram. Mocking, insults, abuse, making fun, etc... The most annoying thing is that those kind of posts pop out all over even when there is United related news that has nothing to do with him. It is actually sickening at this point. Hoping that him or his family doesn't read it.
 
Understandable that a lot of United fans are sick of the club not being where we think it should be, but this anger should be directed at the owners not individual players.
 
Most likely it is, but how would we know for sure that the abuse was from our own fans? For example Maguire might have been abused after an England game by a whole host of fans.
I think a lot of the Ronaldo hate will be coming from ABUs and maybe more recently some United fans. Maguire - whether you agree with it or not - has become somewhat of a joke as far as the internet trolls are concerned. So, so many memes that I don't think it's genuine dislike but rather standard troll behaviour. Again, most are probably ABUs.
 
Maguire has become a meme so it’s not just United fans and in terms of Ronaldo well he deserves some stick for how he’s reacted. Already seen a video of him pulling faces while ETH is speaking to him on the pitch. It’s MUFC not Ronaldo FC…!
 
Our fans are just shit anyway.

They have no ability to build confidence up in its own players.
 
Do our players have access to good mental health services? I often wonder how much of our resources are directed towards the emotional/mental welfare of the players.
 
It is a disgrace that most of the United fanbase detest the United Captain. I dont think it ever happened.

Simple. This captain has not delivered and is the most expensive captain.
 
From a Reddit post on the study:

  • Abusive: The tweet threatens, insults, derogates, dehumanises, mocks or belittles a player. This can be implicit or explicit, and also includes attacks against their identity. We include use of slurs, negative stereotypes and excessive use of profanities.
  • Critical: The tweet makes a substantive criticism of a player’s actions, either on their pitch or off. It includes critiquing their skills, their attitude and their values. Often, criticism is less aggressive and emotive.
  • Positive: The tweet supports, praises or encourages the player. It includes expressing admiration for a player and their performance, and wishing them well.
  • Neutral: The tweet does not fall into the other categories. It does not express a clear stance. neutral statements include unemotive factual statements and descriptions of events.

What differentiates an Abusive insult from a substantive Critical criticism?

Making a definitive statement on a player's character or ability, such as "[Player] is worthless/lazy/arrogant/selfish" is considered an Abusive insult.

Substantive Critical criticisms that convey a similar message could include phrases like "[Player] has been poor today" or "[Player] has appeared to lack effort today." The differentiation from an Abusive insult comes from the lack of a definitive statement about a player's overall character or ability.

If anyone wants to read the paper Tracking abuse on Twitter against football players in the 2021 – 22 Premier League Season

There are several layers of interest:

  • they use the twitter API research account to collect data (i also use it). It allows up to the archival download of 10m tweets, yet they only gather 3.4 that contained "audience contact"/player details. The filtered sample of 2.3 seems small given the number of PL players and over the season.
  • I agree that questions should be raised on the notion of abuse. Table 1 (page 14): uses the example " you are a f****** cheat" without context that could be personal. With context, e.g. red/yellow card, diving etc, it could be criticism. They acknowledge issues of abuse/criticism by labelling the tweets as abusive (page 15-16)
  • There seems a lack of lemmatization within the NLP (root meaning of words) without it the use of slang could bias the results e.g no f*** used in the criticism example used in the abusive examples.
  • There are also issues of language sequencing.
  • Ronaldo received the largest number of abusive tweets on a single day 27th August 2021. 3,961 tweets
  • Harry Maguire received the second largest number of abusive tweets on a single day on 7th November following his apology tweet " As a group of players we are going through a tough period. We know and accept this is nowhere near good enough. We feel your frustration and disappointment, we are doing everything we can to put things right and we will put things right. Thanks for your support UNITED "
  • One of the basic premises of the research seems that players are good fans can be bad. The threshold for criticism of player actions being high and measures of responsive (abusive)tweets being low. The article only serves to insulate players from question marks about their behaviour and impart a moral view on language on fans, rather than the meaning/context behind a tweet.
There are a number of other issues, it's worth a read.

edited

  • there was no investigation into the use bots to send tweets. There are cleaning procedures they could have used to lower the probability of bots sending tweets.
  • Fans and United players: contrary to what some have written in this thread, no evidence is presented that determined whether United fans send "abusive" tweets to United players.
  • There was evidence presented that fans of specific clubs sent abusive tweets to a norwich player and palace player.
 
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I’m quite shocked that Pogba isn’t higher. I was saying for the majority of last season that Maguire was the biggest scapegoat at the club. He was turned into a meme and abused on every single post that he made or the club made. And then people wonder why he might be low on confidence :lol:

People need to stop using his price tag as a stick to beat him with. He’s had 3 seasons here, 1 very good, 1 solid, 1 very poor. But you wouldn’t think that from a particular portion of our fanbase.

There seems to be a weird online presence who support certain fringe players, and they seem to also hate the regulars. There was a clamour for Lingard after his West Ham spell.. ‘Martial FC’, Henderson gets a lot of support, even fecking Greenwood starts trending every now and then (mainly when Antony’s price goes up). Twitter is a really vile place sometimes.
 
Maguire makes sense hes undroppable no matter how much he sucks. Not to mention that arrogant interview and consistantly flippant post match attitude right after sucking. Ronaldo is a strange one though, at least if it was last year, most likely Messi fanboys.
 
That's a lame argument, given it's being published on a public forum.

If you seriously walk around using the term 'shitc**t' in real life you might want to broaden your repertoire of insults.

There’s a patently obvious difference between @ting Harry Maguire on Twitter or bombarding his Instagram inbox with abusive messages to making throw off insults in a match day thread on a forum as large as this.

And yeah that was my point…. That I use ‘ Shit cnut’ as my go to insult in real life. Christ..
Dunno If you’ve ever attended a football match before but people swear incoherently during them, fans, players, coaches. I mean in the womens euros final an England player literally said to a German player “feck off you fecking prick”… Phil Neville once told Roy Keane to feck off during a game...
 
It’s tricky of course but I guess it’s the repeat hate some players get on here which stands out.

I’m sure you’ll agree there’s a difference?

The players performance threads are a good starting point but it is about time the match day thread was tidied up as some of the stuff posted is awful.

@Ludens the Red

Can you not see any difference then, no?
 
@Ludens the Red

Can you not see any difference then, no?
Didn’t see your response but yeah there’s a difference but I don’t know how you manage the forum in such a way where you can differentiate. I view the player perfomances threads loads and I genuinely couldn’t tell you one poster who goes after that one player.
 
Didn’t see your response but yeah there’s a difference but I don’t know how you manage the forum in such a way where you can differentiate. I view the player perfomances threads loads and I genuinely couldn’t tell you one poster who goes after that one player.

it’s about posters recognising and understanding that there’s consequences for what they post here. Some accountability.
 
it’s about posters recognising and understanding that there’s consequences for what they post here. Some accountability.

Accountability for what consequences exactly? A forum is a dedicated place for the public to gather for the purposes of debate and expression, even If a player is stupid enough to choose to participate (keyword choose) at that point its their own responsibility for what they find they are going out of their way.

A completely different situation to somebody posting negatively on a profile set up specifically for the player to communicate, even if the profile isn't being run by the player themselves the comments believe they are and intent is massively important. Really have to question the agenda of anybody who is proposing this kind of equivalency its just beyond laughable.
 
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Accountability for what consequences exactly? A forum is a dedicated place for the public to gather for the purposes of debate and expression, even If a player is stupid enough to choose to participate (keyword choose) at that point its their own responsibility for what they find they are going out of their way.

A completely different situation to somebody posting on a profile set up specifically for the player to communicate. Even if the profile isn't being run by the player themselves the comments believe they are and intent is massively important. Really have to question the agenda of anybody who is proposing this kind of equivalency its just beyond laughable.

What a load of waffle.

Normal people don’t want to read through repeated personal and degrading comments from posters who appear to have stalker like fixations on specific players. It’s most unhealthy.

What kind of debate is to be had with people who simply want to abuse our players? I’d say none as it’s highly likely they don’t have a functioning brain cell and as such would be no great loss to the Caf.

Good riddance.
 
I dont trust their definition of what is criticism and what is abuse/hate without them giving examples.

They do give examples; see my post i link to pages and the document. I don't agree with their examples for philosophical and methodological reasons
 
Yeh I agree. Woolly as feck to suggest that calling some 'a fxcking cheat' is always abusive regardless of context. Undermines the whole thing really.

The only element of that study that's actually of any relevance is that only 0.2% of all the tweets to players were targeted abuse based on part of a players identity.

sadly; the research will be used to hammer fans, yet players can say if you don’t check spelling before tweeting you’re seen as stupid.
 
Yeh I agree. Woolly as feck to suggest that calling some 'a fxcking cheat' is always abusive regardless of context. Undermines the whole thing really.

Whether it constitutes "abuse" or not is debatable/a question of definitions.

However, I wouldn't aggressively call someone I don't know at all a "fecking cheat" if I ran into them on the street. If I wished to express my displeasure with something they did, I wouldn't use that kind of language. Most people wouldn't. And most people who do use that sort of language on Twitter only do so because they're posting anonymously: people who post from verified accounts are much less likely to lash out wildly at people they don't know.
 
Whether it constitutes "abuse" or not is debatable/a question of definitions.

However, I wouldn't aggressively call someone I don't know at all a "fecking cheat" if I ran into them on the street. If I wished to express my displeasure with something they did, I wouldn't use that kind of language. Most people wouldn't. And most people who do use that sort of language on Twitter only do so because they're posting anonymously: people who post from verified accounts are much less likely to lash out wildly at people they don't know.

thst is the issue; ignoring context or assuming no context. They add co text to some tweets not all.
 
This is a an annoying way to present such a metric. It should be a ratio of tweets about the player, and then show the top 10 with the highest abuse ratios.

Ronaldo would probably also lead the most positive tweets, because Ronaldo, and Manchester United. Similar to all our players who would be disproportionately tweeted about most often.

Weird because the study counted positive tweets, but the chart is absolute numbers not ratios.
 
This is a an annoying way to present such a metric. It should be a ratio of tweets about the player, and then show the top 10 with the highest abuse ratios.

Ronaldo would probably also lead the most positive tweets, because Ronaldo, and Manchester United. Similar to all our players who would be disproportionately tweeted about most often.

Weird because the study counted positive tweets, but the chart is absolute numbers not ratios.

I don't think that matters

For me, the data is telling of a few things.

1. We do not protect our players as fans. Maguire's form may have been rough last season, but even prior with the Greece incident, rather than back him, our fans have always been willing to throw him to the wolves.
People won't like this, but he's one of our better players and is a decent cb.

2. Our better performers are high on the list. Fernandes has no business being abused considering how well he has played for us. Yet, again, small falls in form and our fans turn on our best players. Mctominay is not on the list, Telles is not on the list, Lindelof is not in here either.

There are so many worse performers than the players listed ( Ronaldo doesn't count imo since he's pretty much his own brand in that regard) both from our team and from our rivals, yet none are there. It says a lot. Alot about how the media writes stories and how gullible our fans are.
 
Which gives the impression that abusing Maguire on twitter is no different to abusing Easyjet or Tesco.

For some it probably is no different - sure.

But - again - if you were seen outside an actual Tesco ranting and hurling abuse, people would likely question your sanity.

Point being that aggressively launching a verbal attack – swearing, name calling – directly against someone you don't know in order to offer what you no doubt consider "valid criticism" yourself for something they've done or something they've failed to do, well: this is not normal behaviour anywhere in the real world, in fact it is behaviour most of us would consider unsound, unhinged even.

Now, of course there is a fundamental difference between ranting outside an actual Tesco and ranting on Twitter - the latter is largely harmless and can be easily ignored. But still - in principle: why should we tolerate it? It doesn't do anyone any good, does it?

Maybe - maybe - at a stretch you could say that it provides a very tiny minority of people with an outlet for a rage that might otherwise manifest itself in more dangerous forms...but that's it. And it's a stretch at that - I don't think you can scientifically prove that it's the case.

Basically - if it were possible to crack down to a much greater degree on football fans posting anonymous bile on social media...would anyone be against that? Other than the people doing it?