It is now becoming a weekly (if not daily) occurrence that footballers (and Piers Morgan) are being abused on social media, and in Nketiah’s case it was in response to a post he put up about smiling in a training session!
It is now so endemic that surely the social media platforms, the police and the government must now be seen to be taking steps towards stamping our this vile trolling habit by a (hopefully) minority of football “fans”. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but it seems that the more publicity they get without any punishment being handed out, the more they continue to do it.
There has been much made of the fact that quite a few of the abusers were actually Arsenal season-ticket holders, but there are also racist members from other clubs that join in to help spread their right-wing racist propaganda when given the slightest opportunity.
Arsenal have pledged to do their utmost to stamp this out, especially from season-ticket holders and a spokesperson told Sky Sports News: “We all need to work together to drive online abuse out of our game and off our social networks.
“The effect on individuals can be very deep and we work closely with our players and staff to help them deal with the impact. This includes support from sports psychologists and our social media team.
“As a club, one of the biggest challenges we face is identifying the perpetrators and linking them directly to our season ticket or membership databases. When we do have that information, we take the strongest possible action. This includes reporting to the police and membership bans from our club.
“Ultimately we all have to work together to stop the abuse and we fully support the Premier League’s recent statement calling on social media platforms to take more action to prevent abuse appearing online, including requiring all users to be subject to a verification process.”
Now is the time for all Arsenal fans to club together and help to stamp this out. We should all stay vigilant and report EVERY SINGLE bit of abuse that you see online. If we simply ignore it then it will never go away. I personally am on the JustArsenal Twitter page regularly, and I pledge to trawl the platform to weed out these trolls and get them removed. We need to see the police take ALL these incidents seriously and work to get these idiots charged and fined, and in some cases imprisoned.
And don’t forget the judges have to play their part too. Let us see proper punishment handed out, and not just a little bit of probation, which happened in the Ian Wright case.
Let’s all get together and stamp this out once and for all…
Admin Pat
Arsenal had better ban the racist fan forever, to set an example. This is why we shouldn’t condone any types of political message in football
Because kneeling before a game is doing so much to help right?
I condone all politics in sport!
Stadium bans as you mention are useless. Large fines and/or jail time should be the punishment.
Any gesture before a game is useless if we just pay homage to one particular identity group. In fact, no need to make any political message at all because sport is a healthy competition
Stadium ban should be enough to make the other crazy fans think twice before insulting the players or the coaches
if you are suggesting racists needed to see players kneeling as an excuse to be overtly racist that’s very naiive. Racial abuse has been going on in sports for ages. You can pretend EPL’s political campaigns are the problem but they aren’t.
If you think I’m suggesting that you need to work on your comprehension skills mate.
What I said, quite clearly, is that kneeling is not helping the situation. I said nothing about kneeling making it worse did I?
The only naivety here is yours, thinking that kneeling does anything. Pointless activity
The good news is that the general wholesale public antipathy to these NEANDERTHALS, who deliberately set out to wound decent people, WILL force the government to bring forward the proposed Online Hate Bill in thr process of being prepeared to go before Parliament as we speak. No delay is tolerable and so please all lobby your own MP to lean on government to act NOW. The only PRACTICAL antidote to these morons is a stiff jail sentence in everty case.
However, it is vital to understand the key difference between strong and forceful opiniosn on a fan site as some of mine are and hate mail sent directly online to the poor chosen victim. Tomerely offend or to insult is NOT to abuse.
They are different concepts and we lightly lose our precious right to free speech, so long and hard won, at our peril. The woke brigade must grow up intellectually and learn what IS and what is NOT abuse. Opinions are fair comment; direct intent to wound the recipient with venom IS abuse. We ALL must be fully aware where the line is.
No platforming others, merely because they say something with which you disagree, as is your right AND theirs, is denying free speech and as such, is illiberal and harmful. I am aware of the well meant but dull witted lack of intellect of many of the woke brigade.
As a life long TRUE liberal, I will fight this illiberal tyranny, falsely masquerading as liberalism, tooth and nail! I will also fight abuse, tooth and nail!
“Tomerely offend or to insult is NOT to abuse.”
There is this old film I like called 12 Angry Men. If you get the chance to watch it (if you haven’t already) pay close attention and study in detail the juror number 10 character.
HH, OLDER FOLK LIKE ME HAVE SEEN THIS FILM GOODNESS KNOW HOW MANY TIMES. Films are fiction, real life is not!
Youngsters too. . .
Some of the traits of the juror number 10:
1. He think the majority shares his opinions while in reality he is in the minority in his thinking.
2. He judge people based on their kind and not as individuals like someone I know who is obsessed with nationalities.
3. He condemns racism yet by his words and actions he is racist to the core.
4. He think he is a very good and understanding person while he is the exact opposite of that.
When you insult or offend someone (on a regular basis) and say it is merely (meaning its just a tiny minor thing the insulted person should just let it pass) you remind me of juror number 10.
In your lifelong quest for truth perhaps you should stop and think are you what you think you are?
It is not what you think you are but what you do (and say) that defines you.- Rachel Dawes.
You mention the Online Hate Bill, is that restricted to England or is it going to be a collaborative effort adopted by other countries too?
At the moment is it aBritish bill. I do know certain other English speaking countries are also looking into what they can do in law. Biden has issued a statement a while ago, so we wait to see.
People feel false safety behind a screen name and spit out things which they would not even dare to think while standing in the middle of a crowd.
Social media made it easy to create such fake identities so that they can boast about the number of active users and generate more ad revenue. Now everyone is trying to show the world that they are fighting against these trolls. As per Facebook they have created an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform named Deep Entity Classification (DEC) to weed out fake profiles. As per their report they had removed 6.6 billion (yes billion with a b) fake accounts in 2019. The same report says that there is 5% fake profiles in the platform (which will equate to roughly 125 million fake profiles).
In real world conversations are always two-way (duplex, if the other person is not your boss), but in social media its mostly one way. You write your opinion and would not even bother about what others’ opinions are.
Social medias make profit when its users spend more time in their platform. So their algorithms are optimised to hold you to the platform and does not align with a moral compass. If you have a particular view on a particular issue those algorithms will simply feed you with content matching your views just to keep you hooked into their platform. Ultimately you end up thinking your views are the one that the majority accept. You never will see a difference of opinion because those contents and people align with your view. Unknowingly you are becoming a part of a “clique” or a “clan”. You end up in a world where only your views are the right one. (In Sanskrit we call such a person “kooba mandookam”, translates to frog in the well, the frog thinks that the well is the entire universe and there is nothing outside the well).
It will also be unfair to say that social media platforms does not censor contents. They do try to censor but it is not easy. Most people think that those censoring are done by machines using AI (because we are living in the modern world right, nothing is impossible), but the harsh reality is machines are only first level of defense, there are actual people involved in censoring content and those people can be biased or get memos from higher ups to act in a certain direction.
There is also a dark side of content filtering. Youtube outsources these jobs to outside agencies (Accenture is the leading agency which has taken up these jobs). The agencies hires people for 5 – 10 USD per hour without any insurance or other benefits because these will be mostly people who are illegal immigrants or people lacking any formal education. These people have to view videos of extreme violence, rape and child prostitution for 8 – 10 hours daily. After sometime they end up being depressed or committing suicide. Most of these people come to believe that there is no hope or humanity left in the world.