Wimbledon chiefs issued warning after British star Sonay Kartal suffered horrible abuse

Wimbledon is 'damaging its image' by allowing a torrent of abuse aimed at new British tennis sensation Sonay Kartal on its own social media channels. Kartal, 23, was the subject of hundreds of messages of abuse on two of Wimbledon's own Facebook posts after her loss in the last 16 against Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova on Sunday.

Kartal, who became an immediate fan favourite with her laid back attitude and love of tattoos, was the target of cruel messages about her appearance. Only after being alerted to the abuse did Wimbledon chiefs delete around 1,000 messages, some 24 hours after they had been posted.

That is despite there being obvious engagement from those monitoring the channel with other fans commenting. Marcel Knobil, founder of superbrands, said Wimbledon is damaging its image by allowing such remarks on its own channels.

He said: "Wimbledon is a brand icon in the tennis world and one where its brand values are based around fairness, elegance and doing the right thing, not just in terms of style of play and dress, but in terms of behaviour and behaving in the correct manner.

"So to appear to be hosting such vitriol and toxicity would be at odds from what we would expect from that brand. It's such a prestigious and historic brand that it therefore requires all the more to be responsible guardians on its platforms, and it appears that's not been the case here.

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"You cannot, on the one hand, be vociferous with what attire tennis players can wear, with severe reprimands if one has a little splash of colour on a sock, and on the other hand allow for such vile insults to appear on your own platforms.

"They should be focusing on encouraging great volleys from players, not volleys of abuse. This also impacts on the tennis brand in general.

"Football has really suffered as a result of hooliganism and there are many brands that refuse to be involved in that world because of that. Brand image in tennis has traditionally had an image of quality and decency and hosting such toxicity on its own channel really impacts the image of the sport in general."

What should Wimbledon do about the online abuse? Have your say in the comments section.

A spokesperson for the All England Club said: "Wimbledon's social analytics tool automatically rates comments by sentiment and flags posts with a high proportion of negativity.

"Our digital team also does a significant amount of manual moderation of comments across all of Wimbledon's official social channels with the aim of removing inappropriate content as soon as possible."