Reflection on online gambling and the connection to abuse professional athletes receive online.

In the professional tennis world, players are faced with rampant abuse on social media, win or lose. Many players and fans have pointed the finger at online gambling as the source of the abuse. Professional tennis player, Peter Polansky said "Today, I just looked briefly; I had two or three messages, like: 'How can you lose to someone ranked lower than you?' 'You should die.' 'Quit tennis.' Stuff like that." The problem with this abuse, is that it is so easy for the abuser to tweet or message an athlete with no repercussions. Yes, the athlete could block the abuser or report them, but at the end of the day, the abuser can easily make another account and continue the abuse. Another problem is that we really don’t want Twitter, Facebook, and other large social media companies to totally controlling the speech on their platforms. We don’t want these large companies controlling or prohibiting free speech just like we don’t want the government doing it either.

One possible solution to slowing down the abuse is to stop selling live scoring data to gambling companies. Another solution is to not allow betting on individual matches within a professional tennis tournament. Instead the gambler would only be allowed to bet on who would win and/or come in a second place in a tournament. Australian player, John Millman said "The bookmakers are very, very quick (to act) when they've lost money and they think someone's throwing a match. But they're not too quick to stop people, who are using their services, from sending abuse to players. It's pretty disgraceful."

There is no single solution to stopping this online abuse of professional athletes. However, in small steps a solution could possibly be reached with the help of players, sports leagues, sports agents, advertisers, social media companies, and online gambling companies. We don’t need a government solution but we do need reasonable people to get together to find solutions to this growing problem of online abuse of professional athletes, including tennis players.