Iga Swiatek admits she 'doesn't feel safe' at US Open and calls for drastic action
Iga Swiatek addressed the online hate she received.
Iga Swiatek has become the latest star to weigh in on the online abuse that tennis players are often subject to.
The world No. 1 confessed that she doesn’t feel “safe” online and called for more tools to be put in place for protection.
It comes after Caroline Garcia shed light on the death threats she received after crashing out of the US Open, prompting a conversation about internet trolls in tennis.
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Swiatek was one of the first players to praise Garcia for her candid statement about online abuse. Reposting the Frenchwoman’s lengthy tweet on X (formerly known as Twitter), she wrote: “Thank you for this voice.”
And the five-time Grand Slam champion has now opened up on her own experience with social media hate, admitting the internet often felt unsafe. “Well, it happened a couple of times, but I got to say that I'm not, you know, going to my other inbox,” the world No. 1 started.
“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. Mostly I'm trying to be in Internet and avoid that a little bit.” After Garcia raised questions about betting in her lengthy post, Swiatek also questioned whether the abuse came from those who had gambled on matches and lost money.
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She continued: “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 AI 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.”
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French Open organisers previously gave players a platform to block out hateful comments and Swiatek wants to see others follow in their footsteps. “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,” she explained.
“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.”
