Social media abuse in tennis: Female players faced 12,000 abusive posts in 2025

The WTA’s player board said in a statement: “While it comes from a relatively small number of accounts, its impact can be significant. It’s reassuring to know the WTA and World Tennis are taking this seriously, supporting players and making it clear that this kind of behaviour isn’t acceptable.

“The progress highlighted in this report demonstrates the value of working collaboratively across the sport and with our partners to identify abusive behaviour, support players and take meaningful action against those responsible.”

The threat matrix uses AI, supported by human analysts, to assess content across X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook.

The WTA and World Tennis said that “collective action” was required to be able to make “significant progress” to tackle abuse.

In 2025, Britain’s Katie Boulter told BBC Sport that she had received death threats.

Fellow players called for identity verification to be introduced by social media platforms to try to address the issue.

The WTA and World Tennis added: “Insight from this report is crucial to helping us broaden our knowledge of the issue and take decisive action to protect victims of vile online abuse by punishing those responsible.

“While today’s findings illustrate the effectiveness of that action to date, further significant progress requires collective action from social media companies, law enforcement, governing bodies and the gambling industry, and we will continue to proactively advocate for that.”

In the men’s game, a new system driven by artificial intelligence, which blocked 162,000 posts in a year, is being used to combat severe abuse.