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The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and International Tennis Federation (ITF) are highly concerned about the amount of players getting online abuse following a season-wide report.
The duo are now calling on the betting industry to take action, with the study’s findings – taken from Signify Group’s Threat Matrix service – detailing that angry gamblers sent 40% of all detected abuse across the year. Meanwhile, 10 prolific accounts (majority being angry-gambler related) were responsible for 12% of abuse.
Action-orientated approach
Signify uses AI and human analysts and operates across all the major social media platforms in over 40 languages. All players competing in WTA Tour and ITF World Tennis Tour events are covered by the service.
Jonathan Hirshler, Signify CEO, said: “This unique dataset, covering all players across international tennis tours and Grand Slams, illustrates that a relatively small number of accounts are responsible for a significant proportion of prolific abuse and trolling.”
Between January – December last year,1.6 million posts and comments were analysed by the service, with analysts verifying around 8,000 posts/comments sent from 4,200 accounts as abusive, violent or threatening.
The group assured that action has been taken against the most serious and prolific of these, including 15 accounts escalated to law enforcement. A lot of the abuse players receive has been thrust into the spotlight following the French Open this weekend.
A BBC Sport report has highlighted the extent of abuse received by Katie Boulter, 39th ranked women’s singles player, who believes that a lot of online hate she received after losing a tie-break at the French Open came from people who had lost bets on her game.
Looking back over 2024, Signify’s data shows that 458 players faced direct threats or abusive messages. A significant portion (26%) was directed at just five players, while 97 high-activity accounts were behind 23% of the total abuse recorded.
Hirshler continued: “While this is deeply distressing for the athletes targeted, it means that we are able to be even more focused working with the platforms to ensure successful take down, support the tennis bodies to drive law enforcement intervention for the most egregious accounts and work with event security teams to ensure prolific abusers are unable to attend tournaments.”
Of the aforementioned 15 cases, three of these were submitted to the FBI and 12 to other national law enforcement bodies. Account details have also been shared with event security teams to ban individuals from access to venues/tickets.
Constructive dialogue is key
To stop this type of abuse occurring in the first place, tennis authorities argue that betting operators, social media platforms, governing bodies, players and law enforcers all have a responsibility to make the online space safer.
A spokesperson for the ITF emphasised: “We hope the gambling industry responds constructively to our call for more action on their part.”
The Threat Matrix service also looks at abusive direct messages, emails or letters and 56 reports of this type of communication were reported by 28 players – angry gamblers were 77% of these.
The service is currently upscaling to include social media moderation, which hides online hate in real time across the majority of platforms.
Jessica Pegula, Member of the WTA Players’ Council, concluded: “Online abuse is unacceptable, and something that no player should have to endure. I welcome the work that the WTA and ITF are doing with Threat Matrix to identify and take action against the abusers, whose behavior is so often linked to gambling.
“But it’s not enough on its own. It’s time for the gambling industry and social media companies to tackle the problem at its source and act to protect everyone facing these threats.”
Online abuse in tennis has been an ongoing issue for some time since the rise of social media over the past decade. In 2024, Sportradar, a firm which works closely with many betting operators, got involved in tennis’ athlete protection initiatives via a deal with Tennis Data Innovations (TDI) and the ATP Tour.
The firm launched Safe Sport, which is a service now utilised to address online abuse targeting professional athletes through the use of artificial intelligence moderation, education and investigation. It was made available to the top 250 ATP singles players and the top 50-ranked doubles players on a free and opt-in basis.
Concerns over the extent of online harassment some athletes face as a result of lost bets are nothing new. Over in the US, this month Signify also teamed up with the NCAA to study online abuse sparked by sports betting.
The pair used the 2025 men’s and women’s basketball tournaments to identify and study targeted online abuse directed at student-athletes, coaches, officials and committee members. In looking at a total of 1 million posts and comments, 54,096 flagged for potential abuse by AI – 3,161 of which were then officially identified as abusive.
