THE abuse, depressingly, was nothing new. The reaction? Potential dynamite in the quest to find a solution not just to the racist online trolling of footballers, but to the even wider problem of hate crime on social media in general.
“Humanity and social media at it’s worst,” concluded Manchester United and England striker Marcus Rashford after receiving racist bile from anonymous Instagram accounts after his team’s 0-0 draw with Arsenal last weekend.
“Yes I’m a black man and I live every day proud that I am,” Rashford continued in a tweet. “No-one, or no one comment is going to make me feel any different. So sorry if you were looking for a strong reaction. You’re just simply not going to get it here.”
Earlier in the same week Chelsea defender Reece James and West Brom’s Romaine Sawyers also received racist abuse via social media. In Sawyers’ and Rashford’s cases, the police were contacted and are investigating.
There is no textbook for dealing with faceless cowards who attack people based on the colour of their skin, but the eloquence of Rashford’s turn-the-other-cheek reaction resonated in the most powerful manner. This 23-year-old has already shown what can be achieved when a driven high profile sports star intervenes in a social issue. His campaigning for the provision of free school meals has not just embarrassed politicians but forced tangible policy changes. If anyone can finally make a difference to the ongoing disgrace of incidents like those mentioned above, perhaps it’s Rashford.
Calls for tech giants to do more to clamp down on racist hatred are obligatory in each and every aftermath and the pattern remains the same; the initial chorus of disapproval quietens and we return to a state of latent abhorrence… until the next time.
Is the fierce criticism of facebook, twitter, instagram, youtube and other digital platforms justified? Are they indeed allowing racial hatred to perpetuate in a climate of complacency, hand-wringing and even denial?
It has become nigh on impossible to mount a case for their defence. In fact, studies have shown complacency – at the lower end of the spectrum of charges against these companies – to be a malignant influence in the perpetuation of racism in UK sport, football especially.
In the last decade Fifa has, risibly, claimed racism to be ‘on the decline’ thanks in part to its own campaigns. In 2012 Premier League representatives told a parliamentary investigation into racism in football that arrests were at a record low, prompting the following from then PM David Cameron: “If everyone plays their role then we can easily crush and deal with this problem.” The Culture, Media and Sports Committee spoke about how the atmosphere at football grounds had ‘changed hugely’ since the 1970s and 1980s.
Such claims have since been shown to be short-sighted and ill-informed, placing as they did undue emphasis on diminishing levels of overt racism. The monkey chanting and banana throwing may have gone – though recent documentaries have shown the former continues to rear itself – but the extent to which racism is culturally embedded in British society never went anywhere. Studies have shown that when it manifests under football’s banner, it is a reflection of attitudes that prevail among a section of the wider public – including those who don’t care two hoots about the outcome of any sporting contest.
Racism in football has simply been herded from the stands and terraces to other outlets that 20 years ago were not available. Before the explosion of twitter, racial abuse on internet message boards was described as ‘covert’ by some scholars. Its progression to platforms with millions of account holders rather than niche followings of diehards has directed the malignancy full circle. There’s been a regression to the dark days of 40-50 years ago. What gains were made have been eroded.
What can be done? Certainly more than IS being done. Facebook, twitter and youtube operate a ‘report and take down’ strategy to deal with hateful content. In other words, they rely on the public to do their dirty work for them, outsourcing their moderation responsibilities at zero expense. It is time large scale investment was made in the creation of entire departments of staff whose job it is to proactively search for racist and other hateful material, to remove it and identify those responsible. Punitive fines should be built into legislation for failing to remove offensive material in a timely fashion – there are numerous historical examples of such failure.
In this way, the tech giants can bear the brunt of the investigative workload rather than the police. Why should taxpayers money be wasted on resourcing time-consuming police enquiries? If football clubs have to pay costs for the policing of matches, why should those who provide online community platforms expect the same safeguarding for free? Prosecutions are essential, but in instances like the one Rashford flagged up the leg work of monitoring, identifying and tracing should be the duty of the tech firms before publicly funded law enforcement.
Social media companies are secretive about the level of resources they direct towards monitoring and removing inappropriate content. Why?
“We do not give out numbers for the simple reason that someone, somewhere would say that it is not enough,” twitter employee Nick Pickles told a Home Affairs Select Committee in April 2017. Simon Milner from facebook told the same committee: “I would suggest that there is not necessarily a linear relationship between the number of people you employ and the effectiveness of the work you do.”
Assurances have been given to parliament that new technological systems are being worked on to make possible the increased internal vigilance disgusted members of the public are rightly demanding, but progress has been indefensibly slow. Research by the Alan Turing Institute and University College London in 2018 showed just how many digital breadcrumbs twitter users, for example, leave behind. ‘Associated metadata’ in the study allowed the identification of every account holder in a group of 10,000 with a 96.7% degree of accuracy.
It should have come as no surprise to anyone that instagram owners facebook, and twitter, both issued statements in the wake of the Rashford incident condemning racism and pledging to work tirelessly to eradicate it. The high profile nature of the victim, and subsequent media storm, clearly triggered some urgent crisis PR management.
Yet we’ve seen this film before. Facebook in particular has form for being more responsive to complaints about offensive content once they are highlighted by the media. In the 2017 parliamentary report mentioned above, members criticised the reaction of social media companies to complaints from those without the kind of platform Rashford commands as being ‘opaque, and inconsistent’. Some, it claimed, were ‘ignored altogether’.
It is four years now since MPs called on the likes of facebook and twitter to publish quarterly reports on their efforts to tackle hateful material. “Transparent performance reports, published regularly, would be an effective method to drive up standards radically and we hope it would also encourage competition between platforms to find innovative solutions to these persistent problems,” was the advice given. “If they refuse to do so, we recommend that the Government consult on requiring them to do so.”
That necessity came some time ago. We’re getting nowhere on current evidence, which is why hope springs that a figure of Rashford’s gravitas may make the difference.
Of course, he shouldn’t have to, but it might just be that he, and others such as Manchester City star Raheem Sterling, opt to spearhead a battle which is everybody’s to fight – outside of the anonymous misfits who punch away at lonely keyboards.
The likes of Rashford and Sterling have their day jobs. They have already gone above and beyond what they should ever have been expected to do in calling out racial discrimination.
But their intervention, as past inaction has shown, is vital. They have an influence on public opinion that terrifies politicians and chief executives and so hopefully more and more elite athletes will follow suit.
And the more that happens, the more social media companies will realise the futility of mealy-mouthed pledges on racism and hate, and the necessity of effective quantifiable intervention.
They’ve sat on their hands and abdicated responsibility for too long. So long that the tolerance threshold of society has already been breached.
If tech giants don’t act now, it may not be long before lawmakers do.
END