Anton Ferdinand urges social media platforms to act over abuse

Anton Ferdinand

said:

“It is built to make you addicted to it, you can’t put it down once you start scrolling.

“There is a mental health issue of not being able to escape it. My worry is, what are the social media companies waiting for?

“Are they waiting for a high-profile footballer to kill themselves, or a member of their family to commit suicide? Is that what they’re waiting for? Because if they’re waiting for that, it’s too late.

“This comes down to if (the social media companies) really want to make change? So far, their words are that they want to but their actions are different.”

He believes a technic like predictive text needs to be used for the context in a tweet, and if the tweet includes those deemed words, it shouldn’t be posted.

Ferdinand also insisted that the users’ identity needs to be known, at least to the social media platforms themselves.

“

The rebuttal (from social media companies) to that is always that not everyone’s got ID across the world,”

he said.

“OK, well you’ve got a duty of care to the people that are using your platform.”

Ferdinand believes there is another reason behind platforms not taking action.

“

They don’t want to implement (technology to limit abuse), because if I retweet a racist tweet that has been put my way, the frenzy around it is monetary to them,”

he added.

He also thinks the platforms’ leadership team lacks understanding when it comes to online abuse.

“

How many people at management level in these companies have an experience of being racially abused?”

he asked.

“All I hear is, ‘We will never understand’. You’re a multi-billion dollar company – either have somebody who understands it or people within a senior management level (with) the understanding that can influence what’s going on in the company.”

Ex-England international Lianne Sanderson revealed that he has been subjected to racist, homophobic and sexist abuse online and is worried.

She even revealed that the same person was abusing her on multiple occasions with new accounts.

“

You can take down (abusers’) profiles but then they can recreate one without even having to go through anything,”

Sanderson said.

“I’m sure the same people that time and time again abuse me, they just recreate the account, because you can tell by the way they’re writing.”

Marvin Sordell, who is another former player, admitted that online abuse played a role in his decision to hang up his boots at the age of 28. He thinks online abuse has been flourished by social media platforms.

“

We need to find a way for racism not to be allowed to exist within football because at the moment it is allowed to exist,”

he said.

“We find excuses not to go to the root of the problem.”

Tara Hopkins, public policy EMEA director at Instagram, and Katy Minshall, UK public policy and philanthropy’s head at Twitter, said the two companies have deleted about 95 per cent of hateful content with machine learning.

Yvette Cooper showed them examples of abuse that was not taken down for weeks on players like Bukaro Saka and Marcus Rashford’s feeds.

“

These posts are from five, six, seven weeks ago. If any child following a footballer scrolls through the comments, they will see this abuse,”

Cooper said.

“Everything you have said to me seems like utter garbage compared to seeing these posts on the screen right now.”

Hopkins and Minshall started an investigation as they were convinced the posts were abusive and offensive.

Hopkins said:

“I am sorry that these posts are still up, they are clearly violating our policies.”

She added about younger people without an ID:

“We want to keep the platform open to all and be as inclusive as we possibly can be.”

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