Iga Swiatek says it’s becoming difficult for tennis players to be on the internet & feel safe
“A few players have spoken about online abuse, hateful messages that they get. How do you think gambling has contributed to that, and do you see messages from gamblers after matches about the match you’ve just played?”
Iga: “Well, it happened a couple of times, but I got to say that I’m not, you know, going to my other inbox.
I’m only kind of seeing the messages from my close ones, the ones that I already accepted.
But for sure there is a lot of hate…”
Iga: “How much gambling? I mean, I don’t know the statistics. I’ve never made research about it, but for sure people are really emotional when it comes to winning or losing money.
It has probably a big impact, but I don’t know I can tell you like numbers. I think it’s kind of easy to check, but yeah, for sure it’s not easy for us players.
It would be nice if we can kind of do more as Caro did, for example, and kind of try to educate people, and also maybe in the future have some solutions as, you know, using Al to make it safer for us. Because I feel like we can’t be on the internet and feel like kind of safe anymore. You have to really be careful on what you’re reading, who you’re following, yeah.”
“What do you think of what the tour is doing to try to combat this?”
Iga: “Well, what the tour is doing. I know that there are some tools that, for example, Roland Garros offered for us, like this app that we can have on the phone, and it’s going to block the hateful messages. And it’s also going to learn with you when you’re going to tag some messages as hateful or comments, you know.
I’m always kind of saying that this is really nice, and my team also has been kind of looking in my case what kind of messages have been blocked or not when we’re using this app. It would be nice if we had more opportunities to use these kind of tools because it’s always some kind of a help.”
(via US Open Press)
