Thierry Henry will only return to social media ‘when it’s safe’
Thierry Henry stated that “when social media is safe” and not “used as a weapon” for hating others he will return.
Racism and bullying on social media had the former striker
Thierry Henry
disable all his accounts and he believes the problems are “too toxic to ignore”.
He pronounced his action in a statement on Friday when many footballers including himself were subjected to hate posts.
"
Recently it happened to me off social media, it happened on social media. But recently it's been coming quite a lot, players getting abused,"
he told
Good Morning Britain
.
"I just think that it (social media) is not a safe place at the minute. People are getting racially abused but, when you see the statement, I talk also about bullying, harassment that can cause mental issues, people commit suicide because of it.
"It's very difficult to eradicate everything but can it be safer? We all know that it is a great tool but a lot of people are using it as a weapon. Why? Because they can hide behind fake accounts.
"I know that a little portion of the world is using it as a weapon. 'Can it be safer?' is all I am asking. I will be back on it, when it's safe."
The 43-year-old, who departed his role as the manager of Montreal Impact last month, had 2.7m followers on
and 2.3m on
.
tried to make the platform a safer place by taking action on 6.6million cases of hate speech last year between October and December. However, Henry is still not satisfied with how social media is dealing with the abuse as he calls for stricter regulations, like using passport number to sign up.
"
Basically I had enough of what I heard as an answer all the time,"
he said.
"Social media always say that 'we are investigating it, we are trying to do stuff to eradicate it' but enough is enough because I found out that if you want to upload a video on social media, they will block it, you can't even send it.
"We all know why: because of the copyright, because money is involved, so it is different.
"Now for that they can create algorithms to make sure that you don't do it. They will stop you there, they will act strongly there.
"I know people will tell me 'freedom of speech' and 'a word can be used in different ways'.
"But listen, you cannot go in a cinema and shout whatever you want, you can't shout whatever you want in the street, you can't shout whatever you want at an airport. You can't cross the line. All I want is accountability. We need to find out who those people are."
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