Claudia Zornoza is a Real Madrid footballer who was part of the team that won the World Cup and who has announced that she has been deleted from Twitter (which is now called X), with the following message: “I don’t want me to affect what people I don’t know can say about me; I’m only interested in what the people I care about think.” And it goes on to offer selflessly to participate in a campaign against hatred and haters on social networks. It is not a unique case: FIFA has made public that one in five footballers received offensive messages during the World Cup. According to Amnesty International’s Troll Patrol, of the fifteen million tweets that mention women, practically 10% are insulting. If it is black women, the percentage is multiplied by three.
There are haters, that is, haters on the web, who have turned their despicable condition into a trade, as it allows them to get a lot of clicks and make financial profits. On Twitter, the haters are like a fish in water, especially because since Elon Musk bought it, they have had free rein, due to a biased interpretation of freedom of expression. Charles Baudelaire wrote about hate something that is valid for the toxic conversationalists of this social network, although he was born two centuries earlier: “Hate is a drunkard at the bottom of the tavern, which constantly renews the thirst of the drink”.
A UOC study attributes the spread of haters to the anonymity of Twitter, the spiral effect of transgression, the simplification of messages in a few words and the irrationality of immediacy. But it is probably also related to an increasingly irresponsible society, which favors personalities with emotional deficiencies and frustrations, who distill their discomfort on the networks.
The drama is that three out of ten teenagers admit to having had attitudes of hatred on the networks, according to Unicef, by publishing or reproducing a comment and spreading aggression. The soccer player Zornoza has done an act in favor of her mental health by stepping away from Twitter and a contribution for that of others, proposing herself for a campaign against hatred and its minions.