In the recent past Conor McGregor, Claudine Keane, wife of Robbie, and Leinster Rugby used their social media accounts on X for entirely different purposes. Each time somebody came out of it badly.
At the beginning of this month Keane, whose Tweets are now only available to confirmed followers, sought a meeting with Mary Lou McDonald amid ongoing criticism over her husband’s former managerial role with Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv, claiming certain posts by Sinn Féin members had jeopardised the safety of her and her family.
McGregor, with GOD FAMILY TRUTH capped up for emphasis in his X biography, last year deleted a controversial post in which he made an obnoxious joke about YouTube star and boxer Jake Paul, who defeated Mike Tyson, potentially fighting Prichard Colon, who is now paralysed.
This week Leinster Rugby closed its comments section on X for the first time in a decade following personal attacks on players and coaching staff, which the club believed crossed boundaries.
More and more personalities connected to sport have used social media platforms for their own purposes, and more and more it has become a zero-sum game. There is almost always a winner and a loser. In the old school maths equation of finding out what X equals, it is often trouble.
A forum for gossip, misinformation, skewed opinions, and as Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins characterised it in 2021, a place that “embodies the coward’s best friend: anonymity”, frequently sports personalities are bitten. Before Claudine former Irish captain Robbie Keane had felt its sharp end. Last November Keane was subjected to a barrage of vicious abuse after the FAI posted photos of the most capped Irish player presenting caps to the current Ireland squad.
Anyone who has spent time on X will understand that for every decent thought there is a malign comment waiting. For every position taken there is an extreme counter to it. For each post about Leinster winning a match, in this instance against Bath in the Champions Cup, there is a tsunami of Monday morning quarterbacks bubbling with anger and bloated with certainties. It has made X a dangerous place for sports people to inhabit.
McGregor is regularly taken to task but like any supporter of the current US administration he seems immune to the casual cruelty both given and taken. In his transactional approach the stinging rebukes to his playbook appear to be part of the cost of preaching to the people who support him.
But most sports people are not like McGregor. Most adhere to a system where there are norms and guard rails, and where issues of character matter.
On Tuesday 31-year-old Leinster and Ireland scrumhalf and father of two Luke McGrath spoke about the recent trend on social media that has affected his club.
“It’s very difficult and it’s probably more the modern way now, social media is everywhere,” said McGrath. “Has it affected me? I know when I was younger maybe I looked at it a little bit more and read comments. And obviously there were one or two which obviously frustrate you. I’ve probably limited it since then. It is difficult to read comments about the lads you train with. It is very difficult to talk about. I suppose in here we just try and support each other as much as possible. It’s a tough topic because it’s the way of modern sport now.
“I’m a big football fan, I see them getting it as well. It’s difficult to know what to do. I just try to avoid social media as much as I can.”
The dilemma is that Leinster cannot avoid social media. It’s part of their marketing strategy. Despite their success they are always pushing, always promoting and always trying to fill grounds. But last week had been particularly harsh, and it is not only because of the crosshairs on their players and staff that forced the comments shutdown.
Four days ago, in one of his many edicts, Donald Trump signed an executive order outlawing any filtering process on social media platforms and instead demanded the opposite.
“Over the last four years the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve,” said a Whitehouse statement.
“Under the guise of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate. Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
Individual sports stars and teams will make their own calls on whether they have thick enough skin to persevere on social media and whether they think it is worth it.
Disappointing, maybe, as sport can be about many things including honour, prestige and dignity. X continues to erode and debase those qualities. Irish sportsmen and women need to understand that. Then perhaps begin to think about how they might deal with it.
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