According to a new survey from betting news company Pickswise, L.A. Lakers star and activist blowhard LeBron James tops the list of the most hated athlete on social media.
The survey, which combed through 500,000 negative messages tweeted over the last year at athletes, showed unsurprisingly that James received thousands of times more Twitter abuse than any of the others on the top 20 list. He was targeted by more negative tweets (122,568) than the combined tweets (106,599) of the other four of the top five abused players.
The Pickswise list:
Pickswise claimed that the purpose of its list was to “showcase what elite athletes now have to live with” with abusive fans and to “encourage social media companies to do more to combat the practice” of abusive posts.
Of course, it might help if athletes like LeBron refrained from inserting themselves into contentious political issues, including spouting Black Lives Matter propaganda and defending China’s human rights abuses.