Twitter and Facebook respond to football complaint
Twitter and Facebook have responded to the most senior figures in English football following a letter of complaint last month about the rising level of online hate towards players and match officials.
FA chief executive Mark Bullingham joined seven other top officials in condemnation of ‘vicious, offensive abuse from users’ and called on the social media companies to ‘bring this to an end’ after ‘debasing, often threatening and illegal’ abuse on their platforms.
The open letter, sent on February 11, to Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was signed by Bullingham, Richard Masters (Premier League), Trevor Birch (EFL), Kelly Simmons (FA director of women’s professional game), Gordon Taylor (PFA), Richard Bevan (LMA), Mike Riley (PGMOL) and Sanjay Bhandari (Kick It Out).
“The targets of abuse should be offered basic protections, and we ask that you accept responsibility for preventing abuse from appearing on your platforms and go further than you have promised to do to date,” they wrote.
“The relentless flow of racist and discriminatory messages feeds on itself: the more it is tolerated by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, platforms with billions of users, the more it becomes normal, accepted behaviour,” they added.
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The response has not been published but Facebook and Twitter outlined their commitment to tackling online hate on their platforms and shared measures they have previously put in place to help tackle abuse.
Sky Sports News has been told their reply did not outline specific plans to directly address the four key requests made in the letter of complaint, which included the filtering and blocking of messages before they are sent or posted if they contain racist or discriminatory material.
Twitter and Facebook are in regular talks across English football and both companies have representatives in an online hate working group, which was convened by Kick It Out and includes the FA.
English football’s governing body has consistently urged social media companies to move faster with action and, earlier this week, they renewed calls for platforms to introduce identification in a bid to deter online hate.
“I do think there should be some way in which users are identified,” Bullingham told Sky Sports News. “At the moment, they are able to completely avoid any personal responsibility and we think that they have to face up for what they’re doing, in a small number of cases, on social media.
“They [social media companies] should take responsibility that they are the publishers of their content and they, actually, are the only ones that have the technology to act, to prevent it even being published, and to enable the authorities to take swift action when it is.
“They should be doing more and we’re continuing to put pressure on them to do that.”
A spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram, told Sky Sports News: “We do not want discriminatory abuse on Facebook or Instagram, and we will remove it when we find it.
“Between October and December last year, we took action on 6.6 million pieces of hate speech content on Instagram, 95 per cent of which we found before anyone reported it to us.
“We work closely with UK law enforcement and respond to all valid legal requests for information in hate speech investigation. We will continue to work with the police and wider industry to collectively tackle this issue.”
Twitter said last month it would not change its current policy, saying: “We believe everyone has the right to share their voice without requiring a government ID to do so.”
A Twitter spokesperson referred to a company blog, published last month, and its condemnation of racist behaviour.
It stated: “We will continue to challenge this abhorrent behaviour at source along with our football partners and other social media companies. We look forward to sharing updates soon on new tools to support individuals experiencing increased abuse and reduce the burden on victims of such behaviours.
“We have committed to Kick It Out’s initiative to tackle online hate and look forward to continuing these discussions and developing solutions with our partners in football.”
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