A criminal court recently pored over the social media posts of the ex-footballer Joey Barton and found them to be “grossly offensive”. So much so that he was handed a suspended prison sentence, ordered to do 200 hours of unpaid work in the community and pay more than £20,000 in costs.

We also examined Barton’s comments on female footballers and pundits as part of our research into harmful online rhetoric against women and girls in sport.

Our study found that his posts not only targeted individual women – including Mary Earps, Eni Aluko, Lucy Ward and Ava Easdon – but also alleged that it fuelled a wider culture of online hostility toward female athletes.

This is part of a digital culture which normalises misogyny, which then encourages online violence against women. They help to legitimise harmful narratives that might otherwise remain at the fringes of online discourse and extremes of society.

When people with significant reach engage in abusive or inflammatory commentary, their posts act as catalysts that shape polarised and........

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