Police investigations, division and Sheffield Wednesday - When football social media goes cesspit
For all its fun, football social media has become a cesspit, Alex Miller argues.
To borrow a football cliché, the game was gone long ago. As is the case wherever big business meets culture, social media as a fun way to while away an hour or so is more often than not a long-spent thing of the past.
We’ll leave the ramble on how the sinister globality of X and Facebook and Instagram and Tik Tok et al is so heavily contributing to the downfall of community and civility to columnists with a more wide-reaching mandate. While these shapers of society are built in the interests of billionaires and shysters, it doesn’t seem much of a debate to suggest perhaps the old days of an expanded village green spirit aren’t on the priority list. One of the many shames of the thing is that at social media’s dawn, that’s what it was all about.
We digress. This page and this column is about Sheffield Wednesday. And this week, the deeper perils of social media whipped themselves up into a quiet microcosm of what those platforms have become; silent agents of division. Reasoned debate and information exchange is vital to any shared pursuit and whatever the weather, social media provides that. It’s not going anywhere.
But the sanctity of reasoned debate has been shredded and folk are so often shoe-horned into one camp or another. Everything is instant. Brevity reigns and nuance is lost alongside complexity. Conspiracy and rumour rule. Egos are inflated. A thing is good or a thing is bad. This column seeks to pinpoint no case in particular, but after the warm bath of post-Chansiri euphoria, faded battle lines appear to have all of a sudden just started bubbling once more within the fanbase; over football matters, areas of club governance and personality. It’s fractious and, to a large extent, false.
False because, although it dominates so much of football and society as a whole, nobody behaves in real life as they so often do on social media. In the case of Elon Musk’s X in particular, controversy, contrarianism and conspiracy are the constant theme. Opinion is interpreted as agenda, rumour as fact. In the old days, discussions in a pub or over text message would end in shared understanding - either in agreement or otherwise. Now they are snappier, angrier and are had for thousands to witness and interpret into the view from their own phone screens.
Perhaps, at the level of a League One football club at least, none of this matters. It feels unpleasant, but perhaps it’s all just words on a screen and bickering social media nonsense is exactly that. A platform such as X feels a big place when you’re in it, but ultimately the online Wednesday community feels fractional and not-as-significant when looking out onto a packed-out Hillsborough.
A query put to X’s AI search function Grok suggests the number of individual accounts interacting with three or more Wednesday-related posts on a typical week to be in ‘the low thousands’. That number would hardly speak for an entire fanbase and it feels important that everyone - journalists included - remembers that.
When it crosses a line without question is when passions are hopped-up to the point of bullying. A YouTube account set-up in the last week appears to have been created with the express intention of desecrating and humiliating the work of Jake Somerfield, more often known as PunkChef, for a reason not especially obvious. The output is nasty and truly bizarre.
Known to thousands within the Owls fanbase for a channel that has offered his view on Wednesday news stories for the past 15 years, Jake suffers from functional neurological disorder (FND) and his health has taken a hit with the stress of such personal attacks, which have included reference to his condition and his family. It’s a variation on a theme that has been familiar on some strands of that platform for a while now. We’re told police have been informed.
At its best, social media remains good fun. And truly great things can come from it. From a football perspective, when a team is winning and things are positive, there’s still no better place to while away an hour or so.
But there’s something grotty about the way it forces people to behave towards one another. It’s certainly not unique to Wednesday and it’s certainly not unique to football. Alas. The horse has bolted.