As if facing the crushing defeat to Italy wasn’t enough, online trolls bombarded Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka with vile abuse on social media after England’s Euro 2020 final on Sunday.
Twitter said it had taken down more than 1,000 tweets and permanently suspended several accounts following the “abhorrent” racist abuse directed at the players. Yet analysis by the i found that accounts that shared abuse widely had not been suspended on Twitter. Similarly, on Instagram, dozens of users who had posted racist abuse – from monkey emojis and bananas to derogatory slurs to telling the players to “go back to where they came from”- had not had their accounts disabled. Some users reported this abuse to the site’s moderator but were told it did not qualify for a ban. These findings have revealed cracks in social media companies’ policies for eradicating racism, abuse, and vile slurs on their platforms.
