Britain calls on social media firms to tackle online abuse

BRITISH prime minister Boris Johnson told his cabinet team of ministers he would raise the need for urgent action to be taken against online abuse with social media companies on Tuesday (13), again condemning racist abuse against England's footballers.

"He said the abuse was utterly disgraceful and had emerged from the dark spaces of the internet. He said he would use today's meeting with social media firms to reiterate the urgent need for action ahead of tougher laws coming into force through the online harms bill," his spokesman told journalists.

"We expect social media companies to do everything they can to identify these people."

The Times has reported that British ministers will also ask social media companies to hand over details of those who made online racially abusive comments towards England players after their defeat in the Euro 2020 final.

"We want real-life consequences for the people who are tweeting this abuse," the newspaper quoted an unidentified government source as saying.

Black players in the England football team were subjected to online racist abuse after their defeat in the final against, drawing widespread condemnation.

Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter said on Monday (12) they were scrambling to take down racially abusive comments directed at players of the England football team.

The US social media giants said they were taking down racist and hateful content which had prompted condemnation from British political leaders.

The actions came after a stream of abusive messages on Twitter and Facebook-owned Instagram directed at Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka, the three players who missed England's penalties on Sunday (11).

"The abhorrent racist abuse directed at England players last night has absolutely no place on Twitter," said a spokesperson to AFP.

"In the past 24 hours, through a combination of machine learning based automation and human review, we have swiftly removed over 1,000 tweets and permanently suspended a number of accounts for violating our rules - the vast majority of which we detected ourselves proactively using technology."

Facebook said earlier in a statement it had "quickly removed comments and accounts directing abuse at England's footballers last night and we'll continue to take action against those that break our rules".

"No one thing will fix this challenge overnight, but we're committed to keeping our community safe from abuse," it said.

British prime minister Boris Johnson and other leaders expressed dismay over the online abuse.

Culture secretary Oliver Dowden tweeted, "I share the anger at appalling racist abuse of our heroic players" while warning online services.

"Social media companies need to up their game in addressing it and, if they fail to, our new Online Safety Bill will hold them to account with fines of up to 10 per cent of global revenue," he wrote.