The anti-discrimination body Kick It Out is to work with Facebook on a new scheme to combat online abuse in football – and its targets will not be the “vocal minority” but the “silent majority”.
Its new Take a Stand campaign will encourage fans to make public pledges committing themselves to anti-discriminatory behaviour, and provide new tools for education and reporting abuse that occurs on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
But during a year of rising online abuse, when the Premier League players Wilfried Zaha and David McGoldrick were high-profile victims of racism, the emphasis on the scheme will not be to clamp down on hateful posts but change the culture that tolerates them.
“Take a Stand is a call to arms,” said Kick It Out’s chair, Sanjay Bhandari. “Tackling discrimination and promoting inclusion cannot be subcontracted. It is not the exclusive job of Kick It Out or the Premier League or the FA or EFL. It’s everyone’s responsibility, a personal responsibility.
“We all have a role to play. Each and every one of us can take a stand against discrimination and create a culture where everyone feels as if they belong in football. This is a focus on the silent majority, not the vocal minority.”
Bhandari said he hopes to draw on the “common British value of decency” in order to build a culture with discrimination not tolerated but policed by the football community.
Take a Stand does not, however, make similar demands of Facebook. The tech giant has this year been the subject of a prolonged advertiser boycott over its inability to protect users from hate speech. Facebook said that it deals with 95% of reported hateful posts within 24 hours but also said it does not have figures on the amount of football-related abuse posted on its platforms.
The Facebook partnership shows a change in approach after similar discussions a year ago between Kick It Out and other footballing organisations with Twitter. Then, Kick It Out called on the platform to take “concrete action for change”, only for its efforts come up short, with race remaining outside the company’s rules on “hateful conduct”.
A long-term goal of building partnerships with bodies such as Facebook and Twitter, Bhandari said, is to allow all groups to have a better knowledge of the issue. “Part of the problem is that we have a really superficial understanding of what’s happening, and one of the things I’ve been pressing for is for Kick It Out to act as a data aggregator,” he said. “I can give you the tip of the iceberg but I can’t give you details on all of the reports that are made to 20 PL clubs and the 92 clubs across the leagues and to Stonewall and the other charities that receive that data. What I don’t want to do is come back every year and go through groundhog day … saying: ‘The numbers have gone up.’ ”