English football sends open letter to Twitter, Facebook

English football penned down an open letter to Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, CEO of Facebook to raise voice against the rise of offensive and racist content aimed at footballers on their respective platforms.

“The language used is debasing, often threatening and illegal. It causes distress to the recipients and the vast majority of people who abhor racism, sexism, and discrimination of any kind. We have had many meetings with your executives over the years but the reality is your platforms remain havens for abuse,” the letter reads.

Abusers tag the footballer’s name alongside hateful, discriminatory comments or even go as far as posting disturbing pictures that suggest the type of violence they would like to inflict upon the player. However, reporting to social media platforms doesn’t do help.

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The letter expresses dissatisfaction against social media platforms' course of action in combating hate speech and online discriminatory messages on feeds. The more this behavior is tolerated by Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram the more this becomes normal and accepted behavior.

The league has requested Facebook and Twitter to make the following amendments;

Messages and posts should be filtered and blocked before being sent or posted if they contain racist or discriminatory material. Swift measures need to be made to take down abusive content before it further gets circulated.

All users should be subject to an improved verification process that (only if required by law enforcement) allows for accurate identification of the person behind the account. Steps should also be taken to stop a user that has sent abuse previously from re-registering an account.

Further investigating authority should identify the instigators of illegal discriminatory material.

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According to an annual report published by Kickitout.org, in the 2019/20 season, there was an increase in the levels of race hate and homophobic abuse, around football matches and across social media despite the fact that the season was put on hold amid Covid-19.

Further, the report revealed that in the professional game, there was a 42% increase in reports of discrimination in total, up from 313 to 446. There were 117 reports of abuse based on sexual orientation compared to 60 last seasons – up by 95%.

Black footballer sees strangers calling them a monkey beneath the family portraits shared on Instagram and they are horrified and confused. The abuse, in the form of images, insults, appears throughout the year, but surges around major matches, reports The Guardian.