Defender Jess Carter was the England player targeted with the most negativity on social media during the Euro 2025 game against Sweden, new research has found.

SentientSports GuardianAI scanned public posts between 7pm and 11pm on X, Instagram and TikTok during the Lionesses’ dramatic penalty shootout win last Thursday.

Posts to the official Lionesses account, replies and mentions of any England player and uses of the #Lionesses hashtag were scanned and then graded by an AI tool based on the severity of the abusive content.

Of the 10,110 posts during the four hours of the Sweden match, 6.8 per cent were abusive or insulting, with Keira Walsh (16 per cent), Carter (14 per cent) and Lauren James (12 per cent) receiving the most toxicity.

Carter, who said at the weekend that she would ‘step back’ from social media due to abusive messages, was mentioned in 9.8 per cent of posts scanned (989 posts) – almost double the next most mentioned player, Lucy Bronze (517 posts), for whom the sentiment (87 per cent) was overwhelmingly positive.

Conversely, 91 per cent of the posts about Carter expressed negative sentiment – the highest figure calculated.

Of the 14 per cent of abusive or insulting posts about Carter, SentientSports analysis deemed 85 per cent ‘hostile criticism’, 12 per cent personal abuse, and three per cent discriminatory attacks.

The abusive users were overwhelmingly based in the UK (91 per cent), with 75 per cent male users and 25 per cent female. Twenty-seven per cent of users sent multiple instances of abuse.

Carter, 27, started all four of England’s games in their run to the semi-finals in Switzerland, but revealed on Sunday that she had been subjected to racist slurs on her social media accounts since the tournament began.

England manager Sarina Wiegman said that the Lionesses wanted to “send a message to the world” and that Carter is “ready to perform” ahead of England’s semi-final against Italy on Tuesday night.

Dr. Ryan Beal, CEO and co-founder of SentientSports, told Sky Sports News: “There’s definitely more of a tribal nature behind any football abuse in both the men’s and the women’s game, but unfortunately, the women’s game has the sexism angle, which is definitely driving a lot of it.

“A lot of the abuse that we’re seeing is coming from male users on social media platforms.

“Where we want to really focus is what the solution is and how we can use technology to drive that solution. The big social media platforms aren’t providing the right tools to be able to do so. X, in particular, has gone in the wrong direction here.

“If you racially abuse a player in a stadium, you’ll be banned from that stadium – we need to do the same online.

“We can also start to help them take legal action and go that extra nine yards when somebody crosses a line into criminal levels of abuse, racism and sexism. Then we can take proper action.”

SentientSports’ tools monitor openly available information on social platforms but do not include Direct Messages (DMs) sent to recipients, believed in this instance to be another major factor in the abuse of Carter.

Sky Sports News has contacted X and Meta, owners of Facebook and Instagram, for comment.

Watchdog should fine social media companies, says Culture Secretary

The online safety regulator should use powers to fine social media companies that are not quickly removing racism, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has told Sky News.

Nandy says the Online Safety Act should be compelling companies to take action.

“We’ve introduced new laws so that platforms are under a legal obligation to take down that sort of disgusting content immediately,” she told Sky News.

“And they can be pursued through fines, through Ofcom, if they don’t do it.

“It’s now up to those platforms and up to Ofcom to fulfil those roles that we’ve given them and make sure that this is stamped out online, that it’s dealt with very quickly.”

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