Inside the war on F1’s social media toxicity: How the FIA will hunt down and prosecute social media bullies

Thomas Maher 19 Aug 2025 3:00 PM

Mohammed Ben Sulayem, FIA President, 2025 British Grand Prix.

The FIA's United Against Online Abuse campaign is ramping up its efforts to stamp out social media toxicity.

The FIA is leading the tackling of online abuse towards personnel in the sporting ecosystem, including F1, through a worldwide coalition.

Launched in 2023, the FIA’s United Against Online Abuse initiative is starting to realise tangible results off the back of two years of research and painstaking awareness campaigns as it closes in on its first prosecution.

Online abuse is a huge challenge for modern-day racing drivers and sportspeople

“I spoke to a young female driver in a different championship about a month ago,” recounts the FIA’s Erin Bourke during a conversation with PlanetF1.com in the governing body’s hospitality unit in the F1 paddock.

“She is in the space of trying to get brand sponsorships and get economic clarity in the sports space as a female athlete.

“She had several deep fakes made of her that were very sexual, to say the least.

“When they were publicised online, obviously her sponsors didn’t know whether they were real or not. How does it represent the sponsor brand?

“So it’s a network of knock-on effects, and that’s someone who is on the track, she’s there, and then she comes off the track, and that’s what she’s opening her phone to.

“There are probably many challenges [for a driver], but I do think this is one of the most pressing ones, and it’s one that is proliferating, and the type of abuse is changing rapidly. It’s definitely up there for them in terms of their careers.”

Bourke, of the FIA’s United Against Online Abuse [UAOA] initiative, has seen a lot since taking on the challenge of being its project leader. Formerly working in the investment banking sector, Bourke opted to change her career path during the COVID-19 pandemic, returning to education to study political science and international relations.

Fascinated by the challenges represented by the psychological effects of how people interact on social media, how echo chambers can be easily created in such spaces, and how much environmental and political triggers can amplify certain behaviours, Bourke was brought in by President Mohammed Ben Sulayem to lead the UAOA campaign.

Cool, calm, and collected throughout our 40-minute chat, Bourke’s anger in telling some of the horror stories she’s encountered over the past two years of her work is palpable.

She explains that incidents like these, while extreme, are far from isolated in their nature.

On paper, F1 drivers have it all. A dream job, racing in motorsport’s most glamorous and wealthy championship for the world’s most prestigious manufacturers, brings with it all the trappings of fame and fortune that is the cherry on top for an adrenaline-filled life of excitement in the relentless pursuit of perfection.

But this fame and fortune does have a dark side to the coin as a consequence. With F1 drivers and many team bosses and top-level personnel now household names and celebrities in their own right, it’s led to many ‘fans’ taking to voicing opinions. Passionately. Vociferously. Angrily.

This passion and anger can — and with increasingly alarming frequency, does — go beyond what can be seen as respectful discourse on a topic, and there are few fans in the online space who can now honestly say they haven’t witnessed arguments of frightening animosity and venom between team and driver fanbases.

The most obvious example of recent years is the years-long tension between Red Bull and Mercedes after their season-long fights for the F1 2021 titles. Driver vs. driver, team boss vs. team boss, it led to a division amongst most fans as sides were chosen, with the tribalism of the respective fanbases blinding them to the fact that, when everything is boiled down, most teams and drivers will maximise and obfuscate every situation to their favour.

Aside from the usual toxicity that competitors in such scenarios will encounter on a day-to-day basis across their social media, a cacophony of negativity, which most have learned to blank out at this point, there are flare-ups of more intense poison.

For example, look at how Yuki Tsunoda had to contend with a wave of xenophobic comments across his social media following a perceived slight against Franco Colapinto earlier this season. Or how F2 driver Alex Dunne was subjected to a torrent of abuse from ‘fans’ following the Monaco feature race in which he and Victor Martins collided.

Fame and fortune are the positives of making it to the top level, but, seemingly for everyone in motorsport – including in junior categories and grassroots categories such as karting – the pervasive nature of online abuse has meant that it’s become a mental obstacle, seemingly one to just accept and put up with as a hazard of the occupation.

But that’s not how the FIA is viewing the topic of online abuse, which Bourke reckons is the biggest off-track challenge drivers in F1 and the feeder series categories face. To that end, its United Against Online Abuse (UAOA) campaign is one that has been growing in momentum over the past two years.

Under President Mohammed Ben Sulayem, the initiative was launched on the back of an escalated torrent of abuse levelled at FIA race steward Silvia Bellot after a penalty was given to Fernando Alonso after the 2022 United States Grand Prix. Realising the pervasiveness of the issue sport-wide, research into the topic, and identifying ways to help address it, has been the remit of UAOA ever since.

Underpinned by funding from the FIA Foundation, UAOA has published two barometer reports on the extent of online abuse over the past 18 months, as well as a barometer report on the online abuse faced by sports journalists in their coverage.

What have been the findings of UAOA in its barometer reports?

It’s important to point out that, while the FIA is very much the spearhead of UAOA, it is a coalition in which other sporting authorities – such as MotoGP’s FIM, the International eSports Federations, the International Federation of American Football, and the Olympics-associated ARISF – have come together with various governments and partners around the world to lend support to the initiative.

Collaborations have also been held with fellow international federations such as the IOC, FIFA, World Rugby, and World Tennis.

To that end, UAOA will host a second global conference this year, meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, on September 9th, to highlight the importance of protecting athletes and personnel from digital harm – a conference at which further expansion of the coalition is expected to be confirmed.

The headline figures from the 2025 Barometer Report have revealed that:

50 percent of all abuse directed at athletes and competitors is misogynistic or racist, a significant increase from 2024.
75 percent of federations report continued threats against competitors and their families.
50 percent of federations say volunteers and officials now face routine online abuse.
90 percent of federations agree that abuse could force athletes to leave their sport.

In the Sports Journalist Barometer report, the research revealed that:

95 percent of respondents reported that online abuse targeting sports journalists is either “very” or “fairly widespread.”
75 percent reported an increase in the severity of online abuse in the past year, over 40 percent noting a “significant” rise.
85 percent of respondents said that online abuse may influence their willingness to pursue certain stories, threatening press freedom.
Misogyny emerged as the most prevalent form of abuse, followed by sectarianism, racism, and personal attacks on physical appearance.

Assessing the ‘credible risks’ of online abuse and pursuing prosecutions

For the sake of clarity, while the impact of UAOA’s work goes far beyond the sphere of F1, I ask Bourke to give me examples of what her work has uncovered in relation to recent examples of online abuse, specifically in the areas pertaining to motorsport.

“There have been some comments in the public eye like ‘I’ll chase you with a knife’, ‘I’ll doxx you’, which basically means I’ll share with everyone where you live,” Bourke said.

“The scary thing is, for a lot of those drivers, we might not see it because it’s in DMs, and it’s getting to them where it’s really one-to-one. It’s really personal at that point.

“There have been things around gambling. It’s a big factor across the world. When people hedge bets and they lose the money, they want revenge for that. They want to make their voices heard.”

An obvious example of the danger posed to athletes due to those affected by outcomes due to their own gambling habits is that of Colombian soccer player Andrés Escobar.

An own goal resulted in Colombia being eliminated from the 1994 FIFA World Cup, and Escobar was tracked down and shot dead by Humberto Castro Munoz 10 days later.

Castro Munoz was imprisoned upon being found guilty for Escobar’s killing, with the own goal having cost the Henao cartel – for whom Munoz worked – millions of dollars in placed bets.

While this example obviously predates online social media abuse, Bourke said individual threats must be identified and assessed.

“It may start online, but it doesn’t end online,” she said.

“There is proximity, and there can be credible risks in person. Sometimes it’s easy to say, ‘Well, it’s online, delete the comments or mute the comments’.

“Rightly so, that is a defensive action you should take, but we need to assess the threat outside of that, and there are great tools in terms of AI and tech that are able to do that.

“There are a few stories from our coalition partners in the tech space who have identified that, when that threat comes in, say to a driver, they’re able to say, ‘Right, this is where it is. Is it credible or not?’

“Then we’re going to escalate it. That’s what we’re trying to share with the drivers in the industry, being proactive is far better than being reactive, and it starts with having a real understanding of what you know the individuals in your network are facing, like those comments such as ‘I’ll chase you down, doxx your family and come after your family because you cost me 87 grand’.”

But identifying threats is all well and good; what can be done to affect tangible results in stamping out the practices of those who feel emboldened to spill their toxicity across social media?

“If there’s one thing that I would like people to know, is that people aren’t always anonymous,” she said.

“For example, with metadata on tweets, you are able, with the right resources and all open source data, to identify who that person is. We’ve been doing this internally at the FIA.

“We took a series of tweets or posts that were on the criminal threshold, we put them through our partners in the legal and integrity space, and said, ‘Look, this is what we’re dealing with’.

“They go away and compile a case study, and we’ve been able to identify names, countries that they live in, and what jobs they do. They’re not completely anonymous, and raising that awareness will help, say, drivers come forward with the initial cases that we can do that part of the work for them.

“So legal prosecutions are one of the mainstays in any response, and there have been convictions for hate speech and abuse from 12 weeks to 20 months to four years.

“So there’s precedent there that things can be done, but it needs to be a partnership between all the different actors getting that right through the pipeline.

“There’s also AI, which is a hot topic at the moment, and there are lots of different ways to explain AI, but essentially, what they’re able to do is set thresholds of what hate speech is across their own individual platforms.

“So, a driver might say xenophobia, racism, ageism, all these are innate characteristics of hate speech. ‘I’m not tolerating them on my platform’.

“The AI comes in, it’s real-time, hidden from the public eye, and then they’re able to take the action.

“Without getting too inside the psychology space, when abuse remains on the platform, it doesn’t just impact the person receiving – it impacts people who relate to those characteristics as well.

“That can be the fans, it can be the general public. So that approach at the top level helps a massive network that you could map out, but it’s incredibly wide.

“The last thing would be safeguarding. We know that the mental health impacts physical performance, even the economic impacts of online abuse, and so really it’s having in your support network of ‘How can I respond to this? What is my defense mechanism if I’m having it? Am I coming offline? Am I putting out a statement? Am I taking some time to work with my performance coach on a mental health exercise or something similar?’

“Obviously, for the purposes of this conversation, we’re referring to the drivers, but it’s also one that can be applied to anyone facing that abuse. Once you’ve got your base response, then it’s building things that are maybe more tailored to you.”

It could be, then, that, as drivers become part of the FIA ecosystem in paying for their racing licences, all the way up to F1’s Superlicence, part of that membership sees competitors given the ability to opt-in to this knowledge base, whether that be merely getting access to information, or getting support by way of legal enforcement.

“On the driver’s side, it’s them knowing what I can do in the space, and how I protect myself,” Bourke said.

“And as many as we can reach, as many of them as can be signed on to an AI platform, if that’s what they want, is the best thing to do.”

Pursuing those who go too far in their online activities and securing legal prosecutions is something UAOA is actively pursuing, with its first prosecution being actively sought.

“We know that that is a big stand saying actually, to the wider public,” Bourke said, “this is what’s possible.

“That’s quite important over the next year or two to be achieved.”

As for whether such cases will be publicised by UAOA when that time comes, Bourke said it will come down to individual circumstances.

“I think it would depend on the case and the topic and whether the victim would want to share it,” she said, “but, if it were possible, we would state, top-line, this is what’s gone through.”

The FIA’s online abuse initiative addresses ‘performative’ accusations

In carrying out research for this piece, PlanetF1.com spoke to many of the F1 teams, on the basis of anonymity, about how they would assess the actions of the FIA’s United Against Online Abuse.

When it comes to keeping an eye on their own social media spaces, many of the teams either have in-house personnel to keep a lid on the worst of the bile, although some also outsource this real-time monitoring to ensure the worst of the vulgar and the nastiness is either quickly removed, or never gets published in the first place.

This is obviously resource-intensive, both in terms of time and finances, but the FIA has plans to be able to offer greater tools to the teams, perhaps as soon as this year.

“We’ve spent two years really trying to landscape the scope of the problem and understand it, and then to have the right tools in place,” Bourke explained.

“From the team side of things, from a more organisational side, we’re building a response model for organisations that has gone through an academic process.

“That will be to support all the organisations in the coalition and in motorsport, to say, ‘Here’s what you can do and here’s the testing’.

“It’s gone through multiple phases of qualitative surveys with experts in the field, which we’ve commissioned to then say, ‘Here’s how we’re going to address this as an organisation’.

“Each organisation can then opt in at different levels that suit them, their culture, and their environment. That tool will be available later this year. So we’re taking it from both sides.”

While some of the teams expressed support for what the FIA is doing, there were some suggestions that the UAOA initiative is little beyond performative, a political exercise to be seen to be doing something tangible rather than creating anything of any real value.

“I think it really depends on whether abuse has been felt in the team space, away from the drivers,” Bourke said, when asked for her thoughts on this viewpoint.

“We’ve had cases in rallying, where it has been, and we’ve had people on the more corporate side come forward as organisers, saying they’ve felt this, and we’ve had this.

“So it really varies. I think if you haven’t experienced just how deep this can go before, it can be challenging to understand. That goes for the topic just generally in the world, whether you faced it or not.

“But we do have support coming for the teams, and that’ll be later on this year.”

The exact nature of these supportive systems remains under a non-disclosure agreement, Bourke politely pointed out, as she couldn’t reveal further details as to what they may entail.

FIA: If you engage in online abuse, our attention is on it

One prevailing theory that is often offered up when the topic of social media toxicity is brought up on various platforms is that a rapid change of fandom demographics has contributed to this.

It’s not that long ago that F1, while immensely popular, was more of a niche sport, particularly for younger audiences. But the success of Netflix’s Drive to Survive accelerated a rise in the Gen Z demographic, as Liberty Media, as the commercial rights holder, has contributed to a huge rise in the sport’s popularity worldwide.

While unquestionably successful in attracting a whole new audience to the excitement of Formula 1, this coincided with a perceived rise in tribalism and the picking of ‘sides’ in battles, rather than more neutral viewers and fans merely watching out of enjoyment for the sport and technical challenge as a whole.

But is there any data to back up that Drive to Survive has played a role in the increase in social media abuse?

“Given what we know across the coalition and other sports that haven’t had high-profile shows made about them, I think it was coming anyway, because we see even smaller sports and federations saying the same things,” Bourke explained.

“Maybe it’s a symptom of the age we’re living in, and in the way that we’re so connected on our devices. So it’s a hard thing to say because, obviously, there could be a correlation, but not causation.

“From what I know across sport, I think it might have been coming anyway, but obviously we’ve been proliferated more into the eye, and maybe that’s why we see slightly more.”

To that end, are any clues into what might have changed over the past 10 years offered by the study of the data related to audience demographics? Is there a more ‘typical’ viewer who is engaging in toxic behaviour?

“It is a mixed bag. It really is,” Bourke said.

“I think we see it more slightly in areas maybe where there’s more tension at the moment, because we see that translate.

“But, in the work that we’ve done to identify in our legal space, it’s been anything from young females right the way up to older males.

“There are younger males, there are older females, there are people of all different professions, even journalists who have been identified as sending private DMs. So it’s a really mixed bag in that space, and so are the triggers.

“What can cause it? We know, in motorsport, that it can be a racing incident. It could be tribalism between teams and fans, and it’s difficult because you’re dealing with such a diverse space.”

Outside of the competitive arena and referring to the Sports Journalist Barometer report, Bourke said that it’s even evident that individual journalists are finding themselves treated differently by different readers when it comes to responses and reactions to news reporting and opinion pieces.

“It highlighted that the targeted audiences were more minority journalists and females,” she said.

“A lot of male counterparts in the journalism space are saying, ‘I’m covering the same story as my female journalist counterpart, but her comments below the line are far different from mine, even though it’s the same content’.

“So again, different stakeholders, different experiences in those spaces.”

After almost three years, UAOA will continue its work for the foreseeable future, having secured additional funding from the FIA Foundation that will keep it going until at least July 2028. Research and people cost money, but the FIA is convinced this is money well spent, and there are hopes that it will, eventually, attract commercial funding to help ease this demand.

With the next few years defined, is the message from FIA to those who engage in abusive online behaviour that, ‘We’re coming for you’?

“Because it operates in the digital space, we see platforms and laws changing almost daily. It is an iterative process. It’s evolutionary in that sense,” Bourke said.

“We’ve also produced educational modules, which we’ve run with groups to help raise that awareness because, sometimes, it’s difficult to categorise what you’re actually seeing online.

“The message to the general public is that we’re here to support. But, also, if you’re engaging in this type of behaviour, our attention is on it, and we’re developing towards this response, and we are responding to it in multiple ways.”

Engaging with the various social media platforms

It’s logical that some of the success UAOA will achieve will come down to successful partnerships with the various social media platforms that play host to many of these unsavoury interactions.

Of course, for social media platforms, interactions of any description are valuable engagement, so how difficult has it been to get them on board with the idea that reducing toxicity and, therefore, likely reducing interactions overall, is beneficial for society as a whole?

The reality, unfortunately, is that it has been difficult to get many of the big players to commit to the FIA’s cause, but discussions are held regularly with the leading platforms.

“We speak to them quite a bit,” Bourke said.

“With TikTok, we’ve been working a lot with their anti-hate department and their safeguarding department, but also from the brand reputation side, because both have a vested interest.

“We’ve spoken to Meta before, and each of them is developing tools in the prototype phase.

“That’s basically what we’re trying to share. If they need people to test those tools, we’re willing to help provide them and create those links between the social media platforms and the industry side of things.

“I would say X’s business model is very different from other platforms, and it has a different set of community guidelines, and that’s where they’re standing at the moment.”

Where success is being felt is in the engagement of various governments around the world, with Georgia becoming the 10th nation to have its government sign up to UAOA earlier this year.

Different cultural norms mean that what might be viewed as abusive in one country may be viewed as completely innocuous in another, and Bourke admitted this does represent a big challenge.

“Every country has its different ways of operating and different understandings, and that’s where sport is so integral,” she said.

“Because the one thing that they do both agree on is the stakeholders that are in sport coming to their countries and bringing the events there.

“That’s what we’ve seen with the governments that have come on board. They’ve willingly said, ‘We’re here for this’.

“If that’s impacting this, we’re going to come to the table and we’re going to commit and bring our thoughts.

“So we convened around 80 senior-level ministers, presidents, CEOs, last year in Paris to do just that, and we had them for a day talking about this topic, understanding each other’s perspectives, where they’re coming from, what can be done.

“Obviously, there are many countries and there are many more to onboard, but so far, we’ve seen really engaging action from them, and I couldn’t be happier with the support they’ve shown.”

The FIA’s Erin Bourke, project leader of the United Against Online Abuse initiative.

Outlining the targets for success for the FIA’s UAOA

Given that online abuse is a topic and a phenomenon that is unlikely to disappear any time soon, what represents success for Bourke and her efforts with the UAOA?

“The easiest way to define it would be making sure that organisations and federations have that response, and they know the guidelines, that defense mechanism, that they know how to respond, and in that way, the percentage of organisations that are adopting principles in the online space, is it part of their regulations?” she said.

“Is it part of their briefings? Is it part of their educational streams? We’ve seen an uptake in federations creating a response framework. So that’s one measure of success.

“The coalition has grown massively, and when we started, we had basically zero members. The FIA was an early funder, so we had that internal support.

“Now we’re at 70 members, 10 governments across Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe.

“So it’s great to see that side, and the governments are really important because they’re able to enact the change.

“In terms of the social impact, the most rewarding side has been getting buy-in through, for us, most of the drivers.”

But while UAOA has a grander target in mind when it comes to tackling the pervasiveness of online abuse, Bourke leaves me with another enraging story that sums up why it’s essential that a hard-line stance must be taken.

“We’ve just done an F2 and F3 briefing, having them all together and just having the room captivated, having them come up and share their stories,” she said.

“Honestly, this shook me because we have been dealing so much at this high level, at the leadership point, which is incredibly important for the culture and dissemination, but to have a racing driver come up and say, ‘I’ve suffered from this already’, that was absolutely shocking for me.

“We’ve been on this mission, and I feel like the next phase is getting that support directly to the drivers as absolutely integral. Having that buy-in is exactly what we need to just say, ‘Hey, we’re here’.

“Sometimes that impact is not always the big figures, the big outreach, or the numbers that we’ve reached – it might be having that racing driver say, ‘Hey, thanks for being there because I didn’t know what to do’.

“To me, that’s like the real reason why we do what we do.

“There was a story from a young girl who approached me after [such a briefing], and I was really shocked by what she said next, because she said, ‘I love getting on the track. It’s my safe space, but I’ve been suffering from quite horrendous abuse and death threats for doing what I love’.

“She was 10 years old. She was 10.”