Research finds much more hope than hate in posts sent to England’s women at Euro 2022

The study of 78,141 posts on Twitter, Reddit and 4Chan identified more than 50,000 positive posts – roughly one “hate” post for every 125 “hope” posts – while 380 were classed as sexist or homophobic.

The remainder were either negative or neutral.

The report authors said that while this was low in comparison to previous research around the men’s game, social media abuse – and inaction from platforms in removing content – remained a concern.

“Last year we saw horrendous racist abuse directed at individual players after the England men’s team lost on penalties to Italy in the Euro 2020 final,” said Professor Matthew Williams, director of HateLab and an expert in hate crime.

“In the women’s Euros, we found far fewer posts directed at individual England players, which is perhaps unexpected but may be reflective of the different audience for the game and positive sentiment around the team’s success.

“We also know that the portrayal of positive stereotypes in football can suppress the expression of prejudice – our previous reporting around the ‘[Mo] Salah effect’ found a drop in online anti-Muslim hate speech from Liverpool fans and a reduction in hate crime on the streets in Merseyside.

“That said, the nature of the 380 posts we identified was concerning, including attempts to scorn the success of women’s football, players being told in some of the less offensive posts to ‘get back to kitchen’ or to ‘make a sandwich’ and suggestions women should not be playing football.

“There were also grossly offensive posts that made sexual references.

“It is surprising that most of these posts remain live on the platforms.”

The researchers developed new algorithms engineered within HateLab to analyse thousands of English-language posts sent between 2 May and 1 August.

The algorithms are trained on naturally occurring hate speech that is annotated by human coders to ensure a high level of precision, accuracy and recall.

This enabled HateLab technology to detect misogynistic and homophobic posts in real time and at scale during the tournament.

They found England players received 50,422 positive posts during the 13-week period, with “hope” content peaking when England played Norway, Spain and Sweden.

The largest spike was during the final against Germany.

In total, 380 posts were identified as sexist hate speech, following a similar trend over time to the positive content, and peaking with 93 posts during the final.

In comparison, there were 920 racist posts identified per hour at the peak of communications on Twitter in the aftermath of England’s penalty misses in last year’s final.

The analysis of the hate speech posts found:

Twenty-three of England’s 25-woman squad were targeted with hateful posts;

The majority of the hate speech was identified as misogynistic (96%) and 4% as homophobic;

Hotspots were identified in London, Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield;

The majority were made on Twitter (97%), with 3% on Reddit and 1% on 4Chan and most of the posts (94%) remain live;