Former Celtic ace Timothy Weah has been subjected to vile racist abuse on social media.

The American attacker was branded a "dirty monkey" with emojis used by a keyboard yob on Instagram.

The abuse was directed at the Lille frontman with a number of messages, to which Weah responded sarcastically with love heart emojis.

Glasgow Times:

Instagram have confirmed they are investigating the abuse sent to Weah.

A company spokesperson said: "The abuse directed towards Timothy Weah is unacceptable. We don’t want it on Instagram and we’ve removed the account behind it. We share the goal of tackling online abuse and holding people who share it accountable. We do this by taking action on content and accounts that break our rules and cooperating with law enforcement when we receive a valid legal request.

"We recently announced that we’ll take tougher action when we become aware of people breaking our rules in DMs and we have built tools to help protect people, including the ability to never receive a DM from someone you don’t follow.  We’re always working on new ways to keep our community safe and will have more to share soon."

Weah, 21, spent time on loan at Parkhead from PSG in 2019, playing 13 games and scoring three goals.

It comes in the midst of an unfortunate recent spate of similar incidents. We told how Glen Kamara was racially abused by Ondrej Kudela of Slavia Prague who was handed a 10 match ban for branding his opponent a "f***ng monkey".

Kemar Roofe was also abused on social media as was Celtic defender Shane Duffy who was labelled a 'fenian ugly b******' and told 'you're f***ng s*** you c***'.

Rangers, meanwhile, recently took part in a week-long social media boycott with their players and staff refusing to post on Twitter, Instagram or any channel to try and take a stand against abuse.