FIFA's Social Media Protection Service (SMPS) detected and removed over 7 million harmful or abusive posts targeting players, teams, coaches, and officials during the 2026 World Cup, co-hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. This is about 14 times the volume of harmful posts removed during the 2022 tournament, which saw around 470,000 such cases [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
More than 200,000 of the detected posts in 2026 were classified as abusive or threatening, a tenfold increase from the roughly 19,600 at the 2022 event [1]. The SMPS system monitored over 53 million posts and comments across social media platforms during the tournament [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
Advanced AI tools identified over 530,000 messages targeting specific individuals, which were carefully reviewed by the SMPS team [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Approximately 11% of the offensive messages contained racial abuse [2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
Over 15,000 posts were escalated for further action, with more than 1,000 egregious threats reported to relevant authorities, including law enforcement agencies [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. FIFA said, "FIFA’s Social Media Protection Service (SMPS) detected more than seven million potentially harmful or abusive posts during the World Cup, 14 times higher than in 2022" [2].
The 2026 World Cup concluded on July 19 with the final match between Argentina and Spain [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. The escalating volume of social media abuse during the tournament prompted FIFA to significantly enhance its monitoring and intervention measures.
FIFA publicly reported these figures on July 18 as the tournament was still underway, highlighting the extensive efforts to combat online abuse in real time [2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
