KUALA LUMPUR (Aug 3): Seven in 10 footballers in the UK's Premier League have faced abusive tweets, according to the Office of Communications (Ofcom).

Ofcom is a government-approved regulatory and competition authority for the broadcasting, telecommunications and postal industries of the UK.

In a report released on Tuesday (Aug 2), Ofcom said there were 2.3 million tweets in the first half of Premier League's last season.

It said of the nearly 60,000 abusive posts sent in the period, seven in 10 Premier League players were affected.

The report said Manchester United's Cristiano Ronaldo and Harry Maguire were the most abused on Twitter.

Ofcom said just 12 players received half of the abuses — each receiving an average of 15 abusive tweets daily.

Ofcom, which is preparing to regulate tech giants under new online safety laws, teamed up with The Alan Turing Institute to analyse more than 2.3 million tweets directed at Premier League footballers over the first five months of the 2021/22 season.

It said the study created a new machine-learning technology that can automatically assess whether tweets are abusive.

A team of experts also manually reviewed a random sample of 3,000 tweets, it said.

Ofcom said while the proportion of abusive tweets might be low, this still amounted to nearly 60,000 abusive tweets directed towards Premier League players in just the first half of the last season — an average of 362 every day, equivalent to one every four minutes.

It said around one in 12 personal attacks (8.6%) targeted victims' protected characteristics, such as their race or gender.