“Whatever opinion you have, they just lash out” – Shapovalov, Thiem and Kokkinakis on the toxic perils of social media

In our latest edition of “All on the Table”, UTS players discuss their love-hate relationship with social media and how toxic Twitter has become.

Denis Shapovalov, UTS Frankfurt 2024 – © UTS

Chris Oddo

December 4, 2024

Social media, once an angelic infant, innocent, wide-eyed and a sign of hope for the future, is now in its terrible teens. Anybody who spends time on tennis Twitter these days knows that it takes a keen filter to bypass all the toxic attention-grabbing in order to get to tennis news and chatter we seek.

In the latest edition of the “All on the Table” talk show for UTS, Denis Shapovalov, Dominic Thiem and Thanasi Kokkinakis had a frank, open discussion about the troubles they regularly face on social media.

“As soon as you say anything, it’s like someone gets triggered

— Denis Shapovalov

“I Feel like it’s so tough now, like, even on Twitter, like you can’t express your opinions without people completely losing it,” Shapovalov said, as Kokkinakis nodded in agreement. “I feel like Twitter, people just hate, and whatever opinion you have, they just lash out.

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“You can’t have a normal conversation – people cannot respond without emotion.”

It’s a shame that players feel thwarted and oftentimes unwilling to share their thoughts with fans these days. The risk of incurring the wrath of haters is an ever present risk that is now a big part of the decision-making calculus of players and their teams.

“As soon as you say anything, it’s like someone gets triggered,” Shapovalov added.

See the full episode of All on the Table below:

Shapovalov said that when he weighed in on Jannik Sinner’s recent doping case with the sentiment that things should be fair for all players and not just the stars of the game, he was attacked by Italian fans.

“That’s [what happened to me] with Italian fans now because I made a comment about the Sinner case,” he said. “To me, it had nothing to do with Sinner. To me, it was just the principle that it should be the same for all the players, but so many Italian fans were just like losing it, like insane.”

Thiem shared a similar experience. He was lambasted on social media for saying he didn’t support a fund that gave money to all futures players, across the board. Most of his attackers didn’t think to dig deeper. If they had they would have realised that Thiem simply wanted the choice to give money on his terms.

“Same when I said this about this COVID health, I said that I don’t want to give money to future players because some of them are unprofessional,” the Austrian said. “But the thing was, at that time, I was supporting a young, Austrian player. And I was supporting him at the end with like over 100k – I wanted to decide who I helped. That was what I was saying, basically, and I got so much shit.”