Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Government was quick to put boot into players over wages but is slow to tackle tech giants over the sickening online abuse
WHEN people first began to question the Government’s handling of the Covid pandemic blame was swiftly shifted on to easy targets.
One of them was Premier League footballers. The Health Secretary demanded they take a pay cut, the chair of the Culture, Media and Sport committee spoke of them existing in “a moral vacuum” and backbenchers compared low-paid nurses heading into war zones to footballers admiring their bling in mansions. This was crude opportunism because footballers were doing something. The Players Together fund donated millions to the NHS while Mark Noble, Andy Robertson and Wilfried Zaha dug deep to aid local charities.
By June, Marcus Rashford had helped food waste charity Fareshare raise £20million to feed three million hungry children and Reece James set about raising £100,000 for The Felix Project, which distributes food to London’s poorest kids.
I’d call that helping your country in its hour of need. Yet where is that country now these two young men need help to shut the floodgates of online racist abuse? Where is the Government intervention when two examples of humanity at its finest suffer from what Rashford calls “humanity at its worst”?
Unchecked racism on social media is not football’s problem but society’s. If I write anything close to being illegal our lawyers won’t let it be published. Yet these social media platforms freely publish abhorrent material that breaks race and libel laws. With no comeback.
The sewer becomes ever more toxic when a Government stands by, afraid to upset big-tech giants or its party’s libertarian wing which demands freedom of speech without constraints.
Culture secretary Oliver Dowden claims speaking to football figures has “strengthened my resolve to bring in new laws.” Well have a word with your bosses and get it done pronto. It needs to happen now.
Micah Richards explained this week how, for black footballers, racism on these platforms is an everyday reality. “If they log on to social media after a game in which they have made a mistake or wasted a chance to score, it will be there, waiting. It might be a banana emoji, it might be a picture of a monkey or it could be words that make you sick to your stomach. But it will be there.”
And the likes of Twitter and Facebook pay lip service to it. Why not block the trolls, they ask? Because they come with no advance warning. Why not take yourself off social media? Great.
And let the bigots win? A Tory Government promised online regulation in 2017.
Four years on they are still allowing companies to become more profitable through publishing material that incites hate, damages mental health and breaks the law. Parliament must act now.
It should demand that every individual who signs up for their sites provides proof of identity and address. It should demand software to censor offensive words.
If the firms won’t comply then fine them heavily for every breach. They will quickly find a way to solve the problem. Twitter muted the most powerful man on earth last month. How hard can it be to silence the most pathetic?
No human being should have to put up with being debased on social media because of their skin colour. Footballers are not a special case. But they are the most high-profile participants in an industry which makes these platforms millions, so why should they have to endure criminal attacks for doing their job?
Matt Hancock and chums owed Rashford and James an apology for taking a cheap, undeserved shot at them in April.
The best way to deliver it would be for MPS to stop black players being shot to the heart on platforms they are legally entrusted to police.