FIFA's social media protection service identified 89,000 abusive posts during the world cup group stage, a 13-fold increase from 2022. The figures point to a sharper online abuse problem at World Cup 2026, while the service also says its detection methods have improved.
The same scan found that racism made up 11% of all online abuse, up 3% from four years ago. More than 100 examples passed the legal thresholds for case files, and 181,000 hateful comments were hidden after review.
Justin Kluivert and the Dutch players
Justin Kluivert, Quinten Timber and Crysencio Summerville were among the players targeted with discriminatory, racist and hateful comments after the Netherlands' last-32 shootout defeat to Morocco on Monday. Kluivert was the first Netherlands player to miss a penalty in that shootout, and the same group of players who missed penalties suffered racist abuse.
The Royal Dutch Football Association said those three players were singled out on social media. That puts the tournament-wide numbers into a narrower frame: the abuse is not just spread across the wider field of posts, but has landed on individual players at the sharpest moment of a knockout loss.
SMPS review workload
More than six million posts and comments were scanned, a 33% increase on the previous tournament period. Of those, 225,000 were identified for human review and around 1,000 accounts were flagged for further investigation.
The SMPS said there was a significant increase in the objectively worst, most offensive material, and that "data trends show a concerning direction of travel in terms of racially aggravated abuse." That leaves one hard question at the center of the numbers: how much of the 13-fold rise reflects better detection, and how much reflects a real increase in abuse.
World Cup abuse cases
More than 100 examples reached legal thresholds for case files that can be used to enforce action. The practical step for readers is simple: the abuse is already past the point of a basic moderation queue, and the material has been sorted for escalation rather than left as raw data.
For the players targeted after the Morocco shootout, the public record now shows both the scale of the abuse and the volume of material processed around it. The next issue is not whether the posts were found, but how far those case files move once they leave review.
