Social media is a great and wonderful tool that has brought our world closer together and allowed us to interact with others in ways we could never dream of before. Unfortunately, with all the good that social media has brought there is also a dark side. It’s also much easier to abuse, threaten, intimidate, and bully other people.
While those of us in sports media might just label this under generic terms like “trolling” the truth is that there’s much worse rubbish out there that individuals have to deal with in their mentions that crosses any decent human boundary.
The anti-discrimination group Kick it Out released a study of the levels of abuse that EPL players receive on social media and the results are horrifying. That abuse ranges from racial to sexist to homophobic slurs. Perhaps the most troubling element is the fact that the Premier League’s most notable black players are the biggest targets with Mario Balotelli receiving the most abuse.
Via The Guardian:
An enormous volume of racist, homophobic, sexist and other discriminatory abuse of Premier League footballers and clubs on social media has been revealed in new research for the game’s anti-discrimination organisation, Kick It Out.
The search of Twitter, Facebook, supporters’ forums and blogs, using key abusive terms with players’ and club names, refined to identify direct abuse, found 134,400 discriminatory posts this season, from August 2014 to last month.
The research has also highlighted the huge number of abusive posts received by some individual black players, finding that Mario Balotelli, of Liverpool, was sent more than 8,000 discriminatory posts on social media, of which more than half were racist. Danny Welbeck, who moved from Manchester United to Arsenal in September, received 1,700 abusive posts, exactly half involving racism. Daniel Sturridge was sent about 1,600 discriminatory posts, more than 60% abusing him on the grounds of sexual orientation.
Just let those numbers soak in for just a moment.
The research shows that Mario Balotelli receives 33 discriminatory posts on social media per day. He receives over 16 messages per day that are racially abusive. Imagine seeing all of those inflammatory, hateful messages in your mentions day after day after day. It makes you sick.
Furthermore, the study found that racial abuse was the most prevalent kind of discrimination followed by gender, sexual orientation, disability, antisemitism, and Islamophobia.
While it’s not really a surprise given Twitter’s notorious problems in curtailing abuse, the scope of the issues plaguing the platform make you take a step back. Kick it Out discovered that a stunning 88% of discriminatory abuse took place on Twitter with just 8% on Facebook, 3% on forums, and 1% on blogs. There’s a reason why Twitter has admitted they suck at stopping abusive behavior.
While much of the attention in the international soccer scene has been on the disgrace that is the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, this should become a much bigger story with the 2018 World Cup in Russia approaching. Russia has been a cauldron of racial abuse in the soccer world for some time now. And if some major action doesn’t take place to try and confront or stop the problem now, there’s going to be an enormous firestorm come 2018 that FIFA will find itself woefully unprepared for.
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