Social media has become a very toxic place if you are a celebrity and fans often abuse players, actors, and famous personalities for their follies or poor performances in matches.
Something similar was seen when Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) lost the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) in the eliminator of the IPL 2021 on Oct 11 in Sharjah.
As Dan Christian was hit for 22 runs by Sunil Narine as RCB tried to defend 172 runs and earlier Glenn Maxwell failing to come good; it meant that Virat Kohli ended his RCB captaincy tenure without an IPL trophy to this name as the team was eliminated.
This led to fans abusing both the Australian players specifically Dan Christian and didn’t even spare his pregnant partner Jorgia Dunn. The players received horrifically abused messages which led to Maxwell slamming the trolls calling them “garbage” and “absolutely disgusting”, even as Christian requested that his partner be kept out of it.
This has led to the Kolkata Knight Riders sharing a video featuring their former captain Dinesh Karthik, talking about online abuse of players and how it is getting out of hand.
“Say NO to hate-mongering. Cricketers are subjected to online-abuse way too often. It's high time we take a strong stand against it. Victories and Losses are a part of any sport. We stand by you @RCBTweets @danchristian54 @Gmaxi_32 . We've been there too,” KKR had tweeted.
In the video, Dinesh Karthik said, “social media needs to be a kinder place. People don’t realise the gravity of what they say, be it memes, be it videos or just the use of words. It’s a spur of the moment thing for them, instinctively what they feel they put it out there, not realizing what the person reading it will go through.”
