Together FIFA and FIFPRO, world football's governing body and players’ union, are monitoring the social media accounts of all players at the football tournament in Qatar in a bid to shield them from abusive, discriminatory and threatening comments.
Launch of the Social Media Protection Service
Days before the FIFA World Cup 2022 kick-off, FIFA and FIFPRO unveiled their plans to combat online discrimination and abuse in a bid to safeguard players’ mental health and well-being through the use of a Social Media Protection Service (SMPS).
The SMPS, designed to protect both players and fans from online abuse during the tournament, will provide the 32 participating member associations with a specialised monitoring, reporting and moderation service which will allow them to reduce the visibility of online abuse received through social media.
The service will be implemented across men’s and women’s football and will prevent players from seeing abusive messages when they use their phones after games by scanning for recognised hate speech terms published to social media accounts, and once detected, prevent that comment from being seen by the recipient and their followers. Although the offending message remains visible to the person who originally made the comment, its visibility and reach will be significantly reduced.
In a statement issued by FIFA, President Gianni Infantino stated “At the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, we are happy to launch a service that will help to protect players from the damaging effects that social media posts can cause to their mental health and wellbeing.”
Further, FIFPRO President David Aganzo said, “It is the duty of football to safeguard its players and the surrounding community from the harassment and abuse that they increasingly experience at work”. He added that “such abuse significantly affects the victims’ personalities, families, performance, general well-being and mental health”.
The launch of the service follows the publication of two independent reports by FIFA and FIFPRO in June 2022, in which it was highlighted that there was an increasing amount of abuse being directed at football players across social media during international tournaments.
Euro 2020
Following England’s defeat in the final of Euro 2020, England forwards Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka all received a torrent of online abuse after they missed penalties in the shootout against Italy. Twitter removed over 1,000 tweets and permanently suspended a number of accounts for violating their rules in the aftermath of the Euro 2020 final. Facebook, which also owns Instagram, said they had removed comments and accounts abusing the England players. The police also arrested eleven people in the UK in relation to the abusive social media messages.
In response, FIFA and FIFPRO launched an independent investigation which used artificial intelligence to track over 400,000 posts on social media platforms during the semi-finals and finals of two international competitions; UEFA Euro 2020 and African Cup of Nations 2021. The investigation identified that over 50% of players received some form of discriminatory abuse, with much of the abuse coming from the players’ home nation. Comments were predominantly homophobic (40%) and racist (38%) in nature.
The Fare network, who monitor and campaign against racism and discrimination in football through their observer scheme, also commissioned a study into last August's Champions League and Europa League games, involving European clubs, including English teams Manchester United and Manchester City. The study found that the abuse is global, with accounts from Indonesia to Argentina levelling racism and homophobia at players.
Taking legal action
It can be difficult for the Football Association (FA) and other national bodies to target accounts and take legal action where the issue is coming from social media accounts around the world. The difficulty lies where there are cross-country laws, and the rules and regulations vary depending on which jurisdiction the user is domiciled. Further adding to the complexity is the use of proxy servers and VPNS which conceals true location and IP addresses. That being said, legal action can be taken, and last month the Premier League was successful in securing the prosecution of a 19 year-old man in Singapore after he abused Brighton and Hove Albion forward Neal Maupay. This is the first time the league has obtained such a conviction outside of the UK.
Time for change
Football authorities and campaigners have been urging social media companies to take more action to prevent abusive messages being published in the first place. Premier League clubs such as Manchester United regularly have to deal with abusive messages sent to their players online, with much of their time taken up with reporting social media accounts to the platform and the police. However, social media companies are multi-billion dollar organisations with a significant number of resources and technological capability, of which more resource should be channelled into combatting online abuse and hate crime.
FIFA and FIFPRO are hopeful that the launch of the SMPS will help shield players from any hate speech directed at them throughout the World Cup 2022 tournament. Through their collaboration, FIFA and FIFPRO will also create educational resources, including best practices for social media account management and mental health guidance for all players competing in football tournaments in the hope of supporting players mental health and wellbeing during these high-profile events.
