Toronto Blue Jays catcher J.P. Arencibia quit Twitter last week with a three-tweet flourish in which he thanked supporters, prayed for haters and lamented that he gave way too much of himself.
And then Arencibia deleted his account. It did not stop the haters.
An account holder billing himself as Michael tweeted this parting shot:
"If jp arencibia had twiter I'd tell him I jus hucked his jersey off the condo balcony #shegawn"
That 94-character broadside stands as a semi-literate illustration of what athletes, entertainers and others in the public eye know only too well: Social media can be antisocial.
A feminist leader in England who succeeded in a public campaign to have Jane Austen's image placed on a new bank note was bombarded by recent tweets threatening to kill or rape her, leading to calls for Twitter to police its site.
Twitter said this week that a button to report abuse soon would be on its Android and desktop Web applications and already was available on its iPhone app and the mobile version of its site.
"We're always trying to improve our services," Twitter spokesman Jim Trotter said by e-mail when asked why the abuse button was being introduced now.
Twitter rules explicitly bar specific threats of violence of the sort some tennis players said they faced at Wimbledon this summer, though not the sort of garden-variety insults lobbed at Arencibia, who is in no mood even to talk about Twitter anymore.
"I'm done with it," he told USA TODAY Sports this week, waving off further comment. But Josh Thole, another Blue Jays catcher, was willing to talk. He quit Twitter in 2011 while a member of the New York Mets.
"It was just constant negativity," Thole said. "As a team we weren't playing well. Personally, I wasn't playing well. So it was becoming a grind. Every time you opened your phone up, you had all these Twitter notifications, and it was, 'You stink,' 'You suck,' 'You should jump off the bridge.' I don't need that.''
Trolls lurk under the bridges they urge others to jump from. That's Internet slang for those who regularly post offensive insults for little more than mean-spirited sport. Craig Kanalley, social media manager for the Buffalo Sabres, has advice for athletes who encounter trolls online: ignore them.
That, Thole said, is easier to say than to do.
"You're always going to see it," he said. "For guys to say, 'I don't read it,' well, you're going to read it, because if you're scrolling through, that's what pops up."
Johnny Manziel doesn't ignore Twitter gibes — he fires back. This week the Texas A&M quarterback engaged with two sportswriters, and when an Oklahoma fan mocked him, Manziel tweeted back, "Sweet bowl game bro," a reference to A&M's 41-13 win against Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl.
Another fan tweeted that Manziel had a lucky year and wouldn't do excrement this year. Manziel tweeted back a picture of his Heisman Trophy, the statue's straight arm apparently aimed at his tormentor's face. Little wonder the combative quarterback passed 400,000 followers this week.
Arencibia had roughly 145,000 followers. Thole said Arencibia told him he quit Twitter for the same reason Thole did two years earlier — too much negativity.
Arencibia was hitting .219 at the time he quit, and his 10 passed balls were worst in the major leagues. That's troll bait.
"Yeah, it can be really nasty," Kanalley said. "As an athlete, you just kind of have to know it's going to be there and there's going to be criticism, especially when times are tough, but you can't let it get to your head."
Kanalley is an authority on Twitter. He founded Breaking Tweets, a news website that tracks world news through the use of Twitter, in 2009 and later joined the Huffington Post as traffic and trends editor. He began working for the Sabres, his favorite team from childhood, a month ago.
"There's always going to be some ignorant-type comments that have nothing to do with sports even, about any number of things," Kanalley said. "That's just the Internet."
He counsels athletes to have a thick skin on Twitter and other social networks.
"I don't know if deleting your account is a good solution," he said. "In some ways, it could make things worse, in my opinion. That's what some of these fans, or whatever you want to call them, that's what they want.
"They want to get a reaction. A lot of them, that's all they're trying to do."
Free speech or threat?
Some trolls traffic in more than mere insults. Some threaten bodily harm.
U.S. Fed Cup team member Varvara Lepchenko found a message on her Facebook page at Wimbledon telling her that if she didn't lose her first-round match in London she wouldn't live.
"I used to pay more attention to those things," Lepchenko wrote by e-mail. "Now I don't really care."
Lepchenko, who discovered the message after she'd lost that match to Eva Birnerova 6-2, 4-6, 6-4, said these sorts of threats are often from gamblers who have money on the matches. She said other players have had similar experiences.
"I've heard players' comments, but we always laugh at some of them because they are just hopeless bettors that have no idea how hard we work or that there is actually life besides sitting in front of the live scores and hoping for someone to lose or win," she wrote. "I feel pity for these people."
Eugene Volokh, a free speech expert and professor of law at the UCLA School of Law, says the First Amendment protects most forms of speech, though not threats of violence or instances of libel, "whether on Twitter or in a newspaper article or on a Web page or skywriting."
Writing on Twitter is closer to standing on a soapbox in the public square than to calling someone on the phone, Volokh said. Repeated phone calls or personal letters can be considered harassment in some cases, he said, but the same generally does not apply to insults on Twitter because even if addressed to an individual they are available on a public forum for all to see.
"If someone says, 'I hope you get sick and die,' that is offensive but that is protected by the First Amendment," Volokh said, "unless the subtext is, 'I am the one who can make you sick and causes you to die.' The classic example is the thug who says, 'This is a really nice store, it would be a shame if anything happened to it.' Depending on context, that could be an expression of friendly concern or extortion."
Oakland Athletics relief pitcher Sean Doolittle has heard plenty of nasty stuff about him and his family.
"Back in that stretch in June when I was essentially throwing batting practice, I got some really bad ones," he said. "People going after me, people going after my family, people mad because they lost money because they had a bet."
But Doolittle has no intention of quitting Twitter. He says the appeal for him is the ability to show his personality and dry wit and demonstrate he is more than just a baseball player. "I like to use it as an outlet for fans to see a different side of me," he said.
Kanalley said that's the true benefit for athletes — an unfiltered connection to fans.
"They have this ability to show who they are, the ability to really control the message," he said. "It's their accounts, and they can do that in a way to show their personalities. … If you're going to be absent on these social networks, you're going to miss out."
Tough in spotlight
Cris Collinsworth was on the Tonight Show last week when Jay Leno asked him about Twitter. "Tell me about your experiences," Leno said. "Are they pleasant?"
Collinsworth turned to Katy Perry, sitting next to him on the guest couch. "Do they always say nice things about you?" he asked.
"Oh, no," she said, laughing. "Oh, no."
And then Perry offered the bitter wisdom born of nearly 40 million followers.
"Generally," she said, "comments that are anonymous on the Internet are not typically that nice."
Collinsworth told of broadcasting a game on NBC's Sunday Night Football he thought went pretty well and how he figured he would go read some of the nice things people said about him on Twitter.
At this point Perry's pop-chart voice descended into a husky hoarseness as she did her impression of an Internet troll.
"'Die,'" she rasped. "'You're ugly.' 'You're so fat.'"
And the singer, the NFL analyst and the talk show host all laughed their way to commercial break.
"This is the paradox of being a leader or a celebrity in the digital age," said Nicco Mele, adjunct lecturer in public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "There are no intermediaries; whether it's the coach or the team or journalists or PR agent, it's an unfiltered relation, direct access, and that is very challenging for anybody.
"People live years working toward the spotlight and still have trouble managing it."
Thole played in New York when he quit Twitter, but Manziel's experiences suggest the light of social media can shine as brightly on College Station as on the city that never sleeps.
"New York is a different animal, most definitely," Thole said, "but I think you see it everywhere."
Contributing: Erik Gudris. Ortiz reported from Oakland and Brady from McLean, Va.
