The WNBA and Sports Have an Online Abuse Problem—and Few Good Solutions
As the major social media companies retreat from moderating bad content, the leagues are forced to consider what to do next.
Last Saturday, the WNBA’s Indiana Fever hosted the Chicago Sky for their 2025 season opener, a highly anticipated matchup between archrival stars Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. It was a hard-fought game until the third quarter, when everything went off the rails.
Clark, who is white, committed a flagrant foul on Reese, who is Black, leading to a near-scuffle between the teams. Afterward, Reese headed to the line to shoot free throws, during which the television broadcast picked up a distinct, high-pitched screeching, possibly from within the stands. Almost immediately, fans on social media accused someone in the crowd of making racist “monkey noises” at Reese. Whether or not the screeching was an intentionally racist act, the online discourse itself became overtly racist and snowballed across X, Reddit, TikTok and beyond.
The allegations of racism are abhorrent on their own, but they were particularly untimely for the WNBA. Just a day earlier, the W had unveiled a new, four-pronged plan to combat precisely this kind of hateful rhetoric toward players, which has become an increasingly common problem leading to both online death threats and in-person harassment. The initiative, No Space for Hate, was supposed to be the culmination of months of work by the WNBA, whose commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, has said repeatedly over the last year that thwarting all forms of hate speech was a top priority for the league. Instead, in the very first game of the season, the effort effectively failed.