South Carolina’s Raven Johnson warns women’s athletes about ‘toxic’ X environment

Raven Johnson doesn’t have an X account to check, and she’d like other women’s athletes to consider doing the same.

“I don’t really be on social media,” the South Carolina senior said Saturday in Phoenix, the day before she played UCLA for the national championship. “I don’t be on Twitter, because that is a toxic app. I’m going to say: for athletes, if you play sports, or women’s sports, stay off Twitter. Because those people are crazy on there.”

Johnson is no stranger to any of this, as women’s basketball players have become some of the most recognizable athletes in the country over the past two years. The sport’s growth has been one of the bigger sports media stories of the past few years, but what gets lost in the ratings celebrations and the attendance records is what it’s actually been like for the players living inside it.

The sport has never been more popular, and the players have never been more exposed. Every game produces a new set of grievances for people who are not there to watch basketball, and X is where those grievances live. Take Angel Reese, for example, who said last year that people had shown up at her address, followed her home, and sent AI-generated images of her to her family members.

It is not just Reese, though. The hostility extends to anyone with enough visibility to become a target, and in women’s basketball right now, that list is long and growing. Every player who breaks through nationally inherits a ready-made set of detractors who arrived on the platform before they ever watched a game. Netflix’s Elle Duncan argued that the online space around women’s basketball had become “a very disingenuous space” where nobody was actually there to talk about basketball, where the sport itself has become secondary to the arguments people want to have about it, and the players  — in this scenario, Reese and Caitlin Clark — are just the vessels for those arguments.

Johnson plays for the program that absorbs more of that energy than anyone. South Carolina has been to six straight Final Fours under Staley and has won three national championships, which makes the Gamecocks a permanent fixture in a discourse that stopped being about basketball a long time ago. Johnson’s answer is not to read any of it, and given everything that’s happened to the players around her — and Sunday’s national championship result — that’s hard to argue with.