Tackling racism in football starts with the social platforms that allow it to thrive

MSN.com says in the months since the Euro 2020 final, police have so far arrested 11 people as part of the hate crimes investigation into the messages – 207 out of 600 reports of racist comments assessed as criminals. 

Sanjay Bhandari, chairman of the equality and inclusion organisation Kick It Out, says things are worse than what they were five years ago. 

“Our statistics show that reports of racism doubled over the past two years, and the reality is that we’re living in a period of regression that often correlates with the economic cycle of people feeling poorer and looking for someone to blame. People know it’s wrong to throw a banana at a player in their ground and that it’s policed, but actually, you can throw a digital banana at someone on Twitter with virtually no consequences.”   

This evolution of football racism from the terraces and stadiums to online spaces cannot be separated from the wider political climate, points out Dr Thomas Fletcher, chair of Leeds Beckett University’s race equality and diversity forum.

“I think there has been, up until now, a certain reluctance, particularly among the Government to grab the wider issue of racism by the scruff of the neck,” he says.

“These recent incidents in football against the background of the Black Lives Matter movement last summer have contributed to this crescendo of online racism, and I’m not convinced the Government is actually committed to addressing it for the right reasons – there’s a lot of finger-pointing between the FA, the Government, law enforcement and the social media giants over whose responsibility it is.” 

The article says the primary accountability lies with the tech giants to create offender profiles of the kinds of people abusing players in order to better understand why they do it and develop more effective regulation policies, Mr Bhandari suggests.

“In order, it starts with the social media companies, because they have the technology at their disposal to work out who these people are. If you want to enact change, swift and transparent data reporting is what we need to drive policy.

“Secondly, it’s the Government because they’ve got the power to regulate and make laws. Thirdly, it’s football, because football doesn’t have the power to make laws and it doesn’t own technology.”

Making social media less racism-friendly is by no means an overnight solution for the UK’s wider societal race and ethnicity divisions, but silencing the echo chambers and networks that normalise hate is a productive start.

Read the full article Tackling racism in football starts with the social platforms that allow it to thrive by Rhiannon Williams on MSN.com