Anton Ferdinand, Lianne Sanderson and Marvin Sordell spoke at a Home Affairs Committee inquiry into online abuse; Ferdinand said social media companies need to act now: "Are they waiting for a high-profile footballer to kill themselves, or a member of their family to commit suicide?"
Wednesday 8 September 2021 14:26, UK
Anton Ferdinand fears it may take a football player's suicide for social media companies to act over online abuse and its effect on mental health.
At a Home Affairs Committee inquiry into online abuse, Ferdinand, alongside two other former players - Lianne Sanderson and Marvin Sordell - spoke about abuse they had received, racism both in stadiums and online, and what needs to change.
Sanderson said she has become desensitised to the abuse she receives after appearances on television and radio, and is frustrated at what she sees as repeat offenders being able to hide behind anonymous accounts online.
"You can take down (abusers') profiles but then they can recreate one without even having to go through anything," she said.
"I'm sure the same people that time and time again abuse me, they just recreate the account and they do it again because you can tell by the way they're writing."
Sordell said the problem of online abuse was getting worse, and that the online platforms allowed people a "free hit" to abuse.
Ferdinand talked about the impact of social media on his own mental health and that of others, and feared it may take a tragedy for the companies involved to act.
"It is built to make you addicted to it, you can't put it down once you start scrolling," he said.
"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."
Sanderson said racist abuse in stadiums had not gone away either, because deterrents were not strong enough.
"The enforcement is too weak. People doing monkey chants, throwing things on the field, they get a slap on the wrist and are allowed back into stadiums," she said.
"I think you should be banned for life if you are racist at a football match."
Ferdinand suggested similar technology behind predictive text should be used to identify the context of the words being used in a tweet, and if those words were deemed to be inappropriate, the tweet would not be able to be sent.
He also talked about the need for an account holder's identity to be known, at least to the 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 suggested there was another motive behind the platforms' inaction.
"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 said.
He also felt there was a lack of understanding within the platforms' leadership teams.
"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, the understanding that can influence what's going on in the company."
Katy Minshall, head of UK public policy and philanthropy at Twitter, told the committee: "The burden shouldn't be on victims of abuse to report these tweets to us.
"We've got to a place where by the end of last season about 95 per cent of the abusive posts we were taking down using machine learning. Beyond that, we have partnerships with the clubs, the Football Association, the Premier League and others so that anything that doesn't get detected they are able to report it directly to our enforcement teams.
"Marvin hit the nail on the head when he said the challenge is the ease with which people can contact footballers and that's where we're starting to focus a lot of our work."
Tara Hopkins, director of public policy EMEA at Instagram, said 95 per cent of hateful content was proactively removed.
However, committee chair Yvette Cooper highlighted abuse she had found as recently as Tuesday directed at players such as Bukayo Saka and Marcus Rashford, including monkey and gorilla emojis and posts containing nothing other than one extremely offensive racist word.
"Everything you have said to me seems like utter garbage compared to seeing these posts on the screen right now," she said.
Hopkins said: "I am sorry that these posts are still up, they are clearly violating our policies."
Minshall admitted Twitter and other platforms had been thinking for too long about swiftly removing offensive posts.
She said the question now being asked was: "How can we stop these (offensive) tweets being sent in the first place?"
Minshall was asked about the issue of anonymity online.
"You can't be anonymous. If you sign up for a Twitter account we ask for your full name, your date of birth, and your email address or phone number, one of which you have to verify," she said.
"There's no shield from our rules or from criminal liability."
Minshall said 99 per cent of the abuse related to the Euros final was identifiable, in that the users had provided at least one or in some cases two pieces of information that enabled law enforcement to track them down.
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