Thousands of professional athletes use Twitter to reach out to their fans and reveal their thoughts and ideas in 140 characters or less. While some only have a few followers, others have several million. However, one professional athlete did not get the reception from his fans he hoped for.
According to sportsillustrated.com, Manchester United midfielder Darron Gibson closed his Twitter account just two hours after creating it following "a flood of abusive comments."
Gibson's social networking experiment was inspired by fellow teammates Rio Ferdinand, Wayne Rooney and Michael Owen, who also use Twitter. But, rather than fans "showing him some love," they sent attacking remarks toward the midfielder, including one that read "nothing would make me happier than if we sold you this summer."
Following the abusive comments, the Irish soccer player deleted his account just two hours after opening it. However, some Twitter users have started a campaign to bring the Red Devil midfielder back to the social networking world.
According to Ferdinand, Gibson lost interest in the Twitter scene pretty quickly.
"Darron Gibson says he came on to see what the lads were up to," Ferdinand's tweet about the incident read. "He came off because he couldn't be bothered with it not any other reason."
