Get a grip on this scourge of society

SADLY, hardly a day seems to go by now without footballers being subjected to vile racist abuse on social media. It is all too easy for cowardly keyboard warriors to dish out all sorts of stick safe in the knowledge that they won’t be tracked down or punished.

For far too long, social media giants like Twitter and Facebook have paid lip service to resolving a problem that has become a scourge of society.

It was a positive move for a number of English football’s leading organisations, such as the FA, Premier League and EFL, to take Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to task in an open letter this week.

Among the suggestions made were that messages and posts should be filtered and blocked before being sent or posted if they contain racist or discriminatory material and that there should be robust, transparent and swift measures to take down abusive material if it does get into circulation.

“We, the leaders of the game in English football, will do everything we can to protect them (players, match officials etc), but we cannot succeed until you change the ability of offenders to remain anonymous,” they stated. “We note the current assurances from Facebook that standards will be tightened, but far more is needed to drive change.”

That was made crystal clear after Swansea’s Yan Dhanda, who is of British Asian background, was sent a racist message after his side’s defeat to Manchester City in the FA Cup in midweek.

Facebook has temporarily stopped the user from sending Instagram messages, which is effectively a slap on the wrist.

The club said: “Swansea City is shocked and surprised by the leniency shown by Facebook towards one of their users who racially abused a member of our playing squad.”

Facebook have said they want people to ‘have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes’, but anyone with an ounce of common sense knows whether racist abuse is right or wrong. The social media giants need to get tough – and fast.