Don't feed the trolls says the Gooner Fanzine's print columnist Annabel Rackham

The biggest issue appears to be a lack of nuance online says Arsenal supporter and Gooner Fanzine print columnist Annabel Rackham

As both a match-going fan and someone who engages a lot with social media discourse on Arsenal, it is often hard to gage how much of the fanbase really care about certain issues that are being expressed about the club.

I sometimes go online after a game and see comments about the players and the manager that I don’t think would come up if that conversation was being had on the concourse or in a pub.

The biggest issue appears to be a lack of nuance online – a player isn’t described as having a bad game or a poor run of form, they’re often lauded as ‘washed’ or ‘a failed signing’, with language sometimes used that’s a lot worse than the examples I’ve given.

When Arsenal were knocked out of the FA Cup and practically the League Cup in the same week, I saw some fans online suggesting that the manager should be sacked for failing the club.

It would be remiss of me not to caveat all this by saying that social media is not real life and cannot possibly reflect the views of every Arsenal fan in the world.

There are plenty of people online who write balanced analysis of what is going on not only at our club, but about football in general, although sometimes it does feel like you must do a lot of digging to find them.

There’s also been a recent shift in the way users on these platforms are incentivised, with creating a lot of engagement at the top of the list.

It means that writing something inflammatory or extreme about a team’s performance is rewarded much more than something that provides balance because it probably garners more views, shares and comments.

And it’s not just fans who are playing up to this algorithm, but sadly even large media outlets too. Every day there seems to be a new clip of pundits or commentators uploaded onto these sites, discussing something to do with Arsenal.

Whether it’s the manager’s comments about a match ball taken out of context or a refereeing decision broken down in granular detail, it seems the Gunners are top of the list for social media engagement-farming.

Perhaps as a fanbase we have to look introspectively and think about whether we are guilty of ‘feeding the trolls’ more than other football fan-groups in England.

Is it that we have become so notorious for in-fighting that creators see us as the perfect target for content?

Or has such a narrative been created about Arsenal fans that rival ones want to use us for likes too?

Recently, social and traditional media exploded over Myles Lewis-Skelly and both his now-rescinded red card and clapback to Erling Haaland in his goal celebration against the reigning Premier League champions. Most Arsenal fans used the opportunity to rally around the young Hale End graduate, whilst outside of our North London bubble, the reaction was nothing short of brutal. Many more qualified than me have spoken eloquently about the undertones of that reaction, but it again serves as an example of how far this particular narrative was allowed to run.

What could have been chalked off as just a bit of banter from a young player was branded as dangerous and cocky behaviour. The Premier League came out with a statement about potential punishments for goal celebrations (it wasn’t a direct aim at Arsenal alone) and former players suggested the defender could get his leg broken in retaliation for such an egregious act as celebrating a goal.

The discourse around Myles Lewis-Skelly has made social media intolerable for many, including myself, and I’ve been grateful to have the Arsenal community to fall back on in these moments.

Part of me wonders if fans collectively decided to disengage from these accounts, to stop reacting to rage bait and trolls whether it would stop and perhaps the circus would move on to another town and football club. This would mean not giving attention to some within the fanbase who too could also be accused of stoking these same fires.

A better use of all our time as fans would be to get behind the team and the manager. To go back to what I referenced at the start of this column, it is of course ridiculous in my opinion to even consider sacking the manager.

Of course, it is disappointing that we know we will come away from this season without the League or the FA Cups, but respectfully we should be aiming higher.

We have to support the players between now and the end of the season and lift them up as their hectic schedule continues.

We should also support each other as fans too and remember that we don’t need to engage with everything we see online.