Women's Euros: England among most abused teams on social media during group stage, according to UEFA report

During the group stage of the Women's Euros, England, Spain, France and Italy were the teams most targeted by abusive posts.

The new monitoring portal was launched at the beginning of the tournament to monitor and report abuse on social media.

A total of 616 posts from 528 individual accounts were flagged for review during the group stage, with 47 percent of the messages being reported to the relevant social media companies.

55 per cent have been removed by the platforms and the average time taken to remove a post is 63 minutes.

Nineteen percent of the posts were directed at individual players, 20 percent at team accounts, 17 percent at coaches and 39 percent at competition and competition-related accounts.

70 per cent of flagged posts were for generalised abuse, which is abuse that is not specifically targeted at a group or community.

20 per cent featured sexism, 6 per cent featuredracism and 4 per cent featured homophobia.

The data it has collected will be used to fight against abuse during the rest of the tournament and beyond.

UEFA is in close contact with major social media platforms.

It engages in frequent dialogue with social platforms on available steps to protect players, referees and officials from online abuse, as well as engaging proactive with participating teams.

Uva said that the main goal was to protect the game. I am happy that we can see the impact of the project based on the numbers from the group stage.

The hope is that this will give players, coaches and referees the chance to be protected by the European soccer body.

Our next step is to prevent, report and facilitate removal of abusive posts and comments. We will keep sharing insights in the last part of the EURO and in the future.

More than half the players who played in the most recent men's Euro 2020 and AFCON finals were abused online before, during and after the game.

The Lionesses were working on plans to protect players from abuse on social media.

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