Investigating Online Harms, Sport and Gambling

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Abstract: In 2013, Rebecca Marino, a 22-year-old tennis player, made the decision to leave the sport due to cyberbullying. She revealed that the pressure from online harassment, particularly from individuals who had bet on her matches and lost, had taken a severe toll on her mental well-being (Zaldivar, 2013). More recently, college athletes in the United States have joined the conversation, sharing their experiences of facing routine death threats facilitated by the intersection of social media and gambling (Thomas, 2024). Put simply, gambling related online harms in sport is a growing concern and worthy of academic attention. Tackling Online Hate in Football (TOHIF), a research project funded by the AHRC and Irish Research Council (IRC), have spent the last few years critically investigating online abuse, hate and harms in football, utilising quantitative ‘big data’ and qualitative approaches. This webinar will outline some of TOHIF’s findings and will especially focus on findings related to gambling related online harms. The webinar will close with some suggestions for future research and devote time to a Q&A.  

Speaker: Dr Daniel Kilvington is a Reader and Course Director in Media and Cultural Studies at Leeds Beckett University. His teaching and research focuses on ‘race’, racism and anti-racism in sport and new media contexts. He is widely published in academic journals, and is author of five books, including Sport, Racism and Social Media (2015), Sport and Discrimination (2017) and Online Research Methods in Sport Studies (2019). He is the co-founder of the annual Sport and Discrimination Conference series, and has presented a number of keynote papers at academic and industry events. He is Section Editor of the Sport and Discrimination international journal and is on the Editorial and Advisory Board of the International Journal of Sport and Society. He has secured significant external funding for research with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the British Academy (BA), and has undertaken research collaborations with stakeholders including the English Premier League (EPL), Kick It Out, Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE), The English Cricket Board (ECB), to name but a few.