Twitter Hasn't Erased Racist Remarks Against World Cup Football Players Despite Multiple Reports

Trisha Kae Andrada, Tech Times 20 November 2022, 07:11 am

Twitter has not yet deleted racist comments directed against football players, such as the usage of the N-word, monkey emojis, and demands for deportation.

The platform did nothing about 99 out of 100 reports of racist comments in the week leading up to the World Cup, according to a recent analysis, The Guardian reported.

Reported Entries

On Wednesday, Nov. 16, a single tweet was removed after being reported for repeating a racist slur 16 times. The other ones were still live during the weekend.

The abuse was directed at 43 players, including England's Raheem Sterling and Bukayo Saka, who were among those attacked after the Euro 2020 finale.

Every one of the tweets found through the investigation of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) either mentioned the football players by name or tagged their Twitter accounts.

A good number of these were comments made beneath the official tweets from football teams or news websites.

Twitter's in-app reporting function was used to identify the messages as potentially inappropriate.

Hate Speech Analysis

The analysis was carried out by researchers at the CCDH, and the results were made available to The Guardian.

The investigation included a total of 100 tweets that were reported to Twitter.

Eleven of the reported Twitter entries referred to football athletes with the derogatory term "N-word," 25 of them insulted by using monkey or banana emojis, 13 of them demanded that players be deported, and 25 of them told them to "go back to" other countries.

There were 13 tweets published criticizing the players' English language skills.

The discoveries come at a difficult moment for Twitter and may stoke suspicions that players may be targeted during the World Cup.

Twitter's Policy

Since Elon Musk took control of the firm on Oct. 27, thousands of employees have been dismissed.

Musk has clarified that he intends to keep the platform from devolving into a "free-for-all hellscape," and he has emphasized that the network's moderating capabilities would continue to be robust.

Last week, though, Musk said that negative or "hate" tweets would be "deboosted and demonetized," but not necessarily erased, as part of an amendment to the platform's guidelines.

In addition to this, he said that people would not discover such tweets unless they deliberately search them out, which is no different from the rest of the internet.

Inappropriate tagging or references of specific persons may result in accidentally coming across the post, so it is not obvious how this policy will be enforced in those cases.

According to the content policy that is now displayed on its website, it is prohibited to target individuals with repeated insults. The policy further states that tweets may be deleted if they are found to include severe, repetitive use of slurs, where the main goal is to harass.

Moreover, it is illegal to dehumanize a group of individuals based on their characteristics, such as race.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Trisha Kae Andrada