Soccer's racism problem
"It is a scourge technology cannot solve alone," says Twitter's UK team.
The pain of the U.S. women’s national soccer team’s Olympic performance having largely subsided, let’s talk football.
After the UK suffered through a heartbreaking loss to Italy in the Euro 2020 final last month, three black English players who missed their penalty kicks were subjected to a great deal of racist abuse on social media — and that in turned revived the debate over the wisdom of allowing people to engage online anonymously. Now Twitter is weighing in with new research.
The short version: people are perfectly happy to put their names to racist tweets.
Here’s the slightly longer version. Twitter’s UK team says that it dove into both the 2,000 or so tweets it removed for racism after the final match and the accounts that spawned them. It turns out, says the company, that “99% of the accounts suspended were not anonymous.” What’s more, this wasn’t about people picking on members of another country’s team, some misguided extension of football’s national rivalries. It was coming from inside the house. Twitter found that the UK was “by far” the source of the abusive tweets.
Twitter’s using those conclusions to push back against the idea that better account verification on its service would help, and for what it’s worth, Mark Zuckerberg has been a long-time advocate for the idea that Facebook users should by and large stick to their so-called real names, or their identities they use for their lives off Facebook. And that doesn’t seem to be helping much there. The New York Times reports that English soccer has been pressuring Facebook to combat racist speech:
“Yet as the Premier League, England’s top division, opens its season on Friday, soccer officials said that the social media companies — especially Facebook, the largest — hadn’t taken the issue seriously enough and that players were again steeling themselves for online hate.”
Putting aside identity, is there more the platforms can do? Twitter, for its part, is operating is if there is. It says it took steps ahead of the tournament, it says, to be primed and ready to remove racist tweets — including keying up their automated tools for spotting such speech. And they’re experimenting with pre-post prompts that encourage people to think twice before they tweet. Perhaps amazingly, researchers have found that asking people something like ‘Are you sure you want to be the kind of person who posts something like that?’ cuts down on bad behavior.
But Twitter is echoing a discussion bubbling up in academic circles, especially among communications researchers — the idea that fixating on the tools is risking overlooking the roots of real and present racism. Twitter writes:
“As long as racism exists offline, we will continue to see people try and bring these views online — it is a scourge technology cannot solve alone.”
All that said, the debate points to why there’s such a fight right now over researcher access to social media data: it’s really the only way to tell what’s actually going on online. Otherwise, debates are rooted in assumptions at worst and, at best, company research like this from Twitter.
(For more on efforts to decouple racist behavior and English football, check out the Kick It Out campaign.)
Elsewhere on the pitch
How much professional soccer players are worth is largely defined by “a crowdsourced guess at a valuation,” writes Rory Smith:
“Many of the numbers that make that world go around, though — the vast sums that change hands in exchange for a player, the fees due to an agent, the money that will make an athlete rich — can be traced back to a place far removed from all that glamour and wealth: an unremarkable office building on a quiet, suburban street in Hamburg, Germany…
They come from the website Transfermarkt, and the office building it calls home may seem a world away from the public image of the industry that it covers. In reality, it is at the very heart of it.”
Part of Lionel Messi’s compensation with his new club, Paris Saint-Germain, is tied to “cryptocurrency fan tokens,” per Reuters:
“PSG said on Thursday the tokens were included in his ‘welcome package,’ which media reports have estimated at 25-30 million euros ($29-35 million). The club did not disclose the proportion of tokens in the package, but said the amount was ‘significant.’
Off the pitch entirely
—President Joe Biden is throwing a “Summit for Democracy” on December 9th and 10th, hosted by the State Department, with a focus on “defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.” Part of the motivation for the event is the thinking that people around the world are losing faith in the idea of democracy, and, per State, "Hostile actors exacerbate these trends by increasingly manipulating digital information and spreading disinformation to weaken democratic cohesion."
—Some Apple employees are said to be objecting to the company’s new plan to scan phones for “child sexual abuse material,” a.k.a. CSAM. It’s significant in part because Apple employees are rarely seen objecting to anything the company does.
—The debate over the crypto provisions in the infrastructure bill still being debated in Congress is a testament to the cryptocurrency world’s growing lobbying ambitions.
—DoorDash has reportedly dropped talk of buying up Instacart at least in part over concerns that Washington’s antitrust infrastructure — a la the FTC and DOJ — revived under Biden would object to the restaurant delivery company spreading into the grocery delivery space — a chilling effect antitrust advocates are gonna love and critics are gonna to point to as a problem.
—Twitter’s new font, called Chirp, “does take people a little time to get used to,” conceded a spokesperson.
—Death, taxes, and Chuck Schumer not getting an iPhone: so much has changed in the last few years, but one thing is a rock we can rely on. The Senate Majority Leader believes he can do his part running the country best from an old school cellie:
“Senator Chuck Schumer of New York ducked into the Democratic cloakroom on Tuesday to take a call on his old-school flip phone from President Biden. Senators were basking in a rare bipartisan success on infrastructure and gearing up for a more partisan budget brawl — and the president wanted to tell the majority leader he was a ‘magician.’
‘Not yet, Mr. President,’ Mr. Schumer objected from one of the private sanctuary’s phone booths, according to an official familiar with the call. ‘Only one ear of the rabbit is out of the hat.’