Tyrone Mings: England defender says racist trolls would 'get bored' if their abuse was less visible
England defender Tyrone Mings believes racist trolls would lose interest if the abuse they posted was filtered to be less visible.
Aston Villa centre-back Mings has discussed the issue of online abuse with West Ham forward Michail Antonio as part of The Shop Talk series sponsored by the Professional Footballers’ Association.
Mings believes trolls target players in the hope that their account handles are shared, in order to gain notoriety.
- UEFA investigating alleged discrimination at Germany vs Hungary
- Alvaro Morata reveals online and family abuse
He said: “When you filter (your social media accounts) better, and you stop people being able to see it as much, trolls will get bored – they just want to trigger you.”
Antonio suggested that an attempt to post certain words should trigger an alert which leads to social media companies immediately blocking the account in question.
Trending
“Why can you not have words that literally send an alert straight to Instagram, so you can’t physically type that word into the platform?” he asked.
“As soon as it comes up, it sends an alert and then accounts get blocked instantly. I feel like that should be the answer and that should be an easy thing to be done.”
Antonio repeated a call he first made in December 2019 for racist abuse in stadiums to be punished with points deductions.
“At games, it should be points deducted. I don’t think fines or anything is good enough. I think points deducted is when fans start dealing with it themselves,” he said.
The football authorities in England wrote to the chief executives of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in February calling for them to act to stop their platforms becoming “havens of abuse”.
The same authorities then initiated a social media boycott over the bank holiday weekend early last month, which was joined by a variety of sporting bodies – as well as media outlets, including Sky Sports News – around the UK and Europe.
Hate Won’t Win
Sky Sports is committed to making skysports.com and our channels on social media platforms a place for comment and debate that is free of abuse, hate and profanity.
For more information, please visit: www.skysports.com/againstonlinehate
If you see a reply to Sky Sports posts and/or content with an expression of hate on the basis of expression of hate on the basis of race, sex, colour, gender, nationality, ethnicity, disability, religion, sexuality, age or class, please copy the URL to the hateful post and screengrab it and email us here.
Kick It Out reporting racism
Online Reporting Form | Kick It Out
Kick It Out is football’s equality and inclusion organisation – working throughout the football, educational and community sectors to challenge discrimination, encourage inclusive practices and campaign for positive change.
www.kickitout.org
Source: Read Full Article