It will be like going back over 10 years. The silence of the social media of all the Premier League clubs and the English minor leagues, next weekend, it will be deafening. A black-out agreed by the clubs, and with the support of the players, lasting three days to protest against the racist insults directed at their players on these platforms. One way to stigmatize the increasingly worrying phenomenon of hater, but also to sensitize social platforms to exercise greater control over the contents conveyed.
32 million followers
In the initiative, a sort of white strike by social media managers, the clubs of the English Football Association, Premier League, Second Division and the Women’s Super League are involved. At 2 pm on Friday 30 April at 2 pm local time, and until Monday 3 May at 10:59 pm, the profiles Twitter, Facebook, Instagram e TikTok of all the teams, oracles normally in continuous activity, will be silent. An audience of approximately 35 million users around the world will suddenly be left without a continuous direct line with their reference team and their favorites.
Closed sites
“This action has been scheduled for the entire list of men’s and women’s professional football matches” and will see all the representative bodies of English football “close their accounts Facebook, Twitter e Instagram“. It comes “in response to the ongoing and ongoing discriminatory abuse received online by players and many other football-related people,” British football officials said in a joint statement. “Racist behavior is unacceptable and the appalling abuse of players on social media it cannot continue, ”said Premier League CEO Richard Masters. “There is an urgent need for these companies to do more to eradicate racial hatred online,” he added.
Previous
This decision follows the one already implemented by the Scottish club Rangers by the English Football League clubs of Birmingham and Swansea, whose players Yan Dhanda, Ben Cabango and Jamal Lowe ended up in the meat grinder of racist slurs. Since the beginning of the year, several black Manchester United players have been targeted, such as Anthony Martial e Marcus Rashford, as well as Reece James of Chelsea. English football officials have called for action “for reasons of simple human decency” in a letter sent on February 11 to the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, and to that of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Twitter replied that it did not intend to censor comments from anonymous accounts.
April 25, 2021 (change April 25, 2021 | 11:21)
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