Should Social Media Companies Protect Footballers More?

Social media has transformed society and has allowed everyone around the world to connect. There are many positives about this but also there are major drawbacks which can be amplified by the more followers you have. Premier League footballers all have millions of fans and most do behave well but there is a growing number that use social media to abuse EPL players.

Online is packed with helpful resources for football fans such as club stats, blogs, betting tips, and platforms to help you calculate your potential winnings. All of these are resources to help fans and social media plays a big part in helping to promote clubs and players. The problem is that the latter is being used as a tool to abuse players, with racism a massive problem on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

In this article, I will talk about if there should be more protection offered by social media companies to help stop this abuse.

#1 – Verified Identities

One of the ways that would help limit the abuse received by footballers is by social media companies insisting on users verifying their identity before they are able to post comments or send direct messages. It would help to dramatically cut the number of offensive comments as users have been using fake accounts to hide their identity so that they can make abusive threats or racist comments.

Twitter and Facebook are not in favour of this as it would mean that the growth of their companies could be damaged as there would be fewer signups and users would seek other platforms. That is not a good enough excuse and something will have to be implemented to stop unverified accounts from being used for racism and abuse.

#2 – Banning Accounts

One of the easiest solutions to stop abuse on social media platforms is by banning the accounts of those that are caught. Twitter and Facebook are not strong enough in their approach as instead of a direct ban they are giving warnings. I think that a 6-month ban should be implemented right away if the account has been causing abuse and would help the situation.

#3 – Taking Legal Account

You cannot go up to anyone in the street and start racially abusing them. If you do that person can take you to court and press charges. At present when a user abuses a football player there are no ramifications. If the users that were caught abusing players were taken to court it would set a precedent and make others thinks twice about doing it.

#4 – Filtering Abusive Comments and Direct Messages

The preferred option of the social media giants is to create an AI system that can identify abusive and filter these messages out before they reach their target. It could lead to many problems as it is very hard to identify which ones are abusive as users can use slang or abbreviated words to attempt to get around this.