Tackling Social Media Abuse? Critically Assessing English Football’s Response to Online Racism

Abstract

Tackling social media abuse? Critically assessing English football's response to online racism. AbstractAlthough English football has, to some extent, managed the problem of racism in and around football matches, recent years have seen an increase of football related racist content published on social media. Footballers are frequently the target or subject of such abuse, and occasionally the source of it. In this context, this article explores and critically assesses the response of English football's institutions, organisations and clubs to the problem of racism on social media. Its findings are based on interviews with key officials from the Professional Footballers Association (PFA) and Kick It Out, and with safeguarding and media officers from football clubs across the English Premier League (EPL) and English Football League (EFL). It concludes there are a number of systematic failings undermining or hindering football's attempts to address this issue including poor co-ordination, a lack of clear guidelines, ad hoc educational provision, a shortage of resources, and a culture of secrecy at many clubs. The article concludes with some recommendations about how these weaknesses may start to be improved.

From Ferguson to Gaza. Sport, political sensibility, and the Israel/Palestine conflict in the age of Black Lives Matter

“…Studies involving the use of social media are increasingly common in the sociology of sport, with discourse analysis being used to explore the changing ways we are communicating (Cleland, 2014;Kilvington & Price, 2019;Moreau, et al, 2021). Critical Discourse Analysis is a form of discourse analysis that uses an interdisciplinary approach to study how power is exercised through language (Fairclough, 1995;Janks, 1997).…”

Guest editorial

“…Another area of research engaged in the observation of social media platforms as places of negative behaviors such as racism or sexual abuse (O'Hallarn et al , 2018a, 2019). Certainly, researchers also investigated how these negative behaviors could be prevented or how organizations deal with such topics (Kilvington and Price, 2019; Sanderson and Wheaters, 2020). Several scholars have also researched digital and medial discourse dealing with topics such as the protest movement of Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe (Schmidt et al , 2019) on other digital media platforms like fora or digital news platforms.…”

The virtual stages of hate: Using Goffman’s work to conceptualise the motivations for online hate

“…Social media, in particular, has ‘allowed old racial schemata to be broadcast in new social settings anonymously via smart phones and computers’ (Cleland, 2014: 417). Hate speech is therefore no longer confined to offline spaces, as electronic communications devices are now being used to communicate and spread hatred, allowing individuals and groups the opportunity to reach potentially larger audiences than ever before (Brown, 2009; Farrington et al, 2015; Kilvington and Price, 2017, 2019). As the ICCA (2013: 9) note, extremist and hate groups now ‘host their own websites with impunity’, using them to ‘spread propaganda’ and build communities of like-minded people.…”

“…Although individuals often use virtual frontstage spaces to purport an idealised version of the self (Merunkova and Slerka, 2019; Miguel and Medina, 2010; Moore et al, 2017; Serpa and Ferreira, 2018), we must consider the influence that anonymity, invisibility, dissociative imagination and spontaneity have upon performances (Brown, 2017; Farrington et al, 2015; Kilvington and Price, 2017, 2019; Suler, 2004). Online derogation is not just reserved for virtual backstages; it has saturated virtual frontstages as publicly visible online hate speech continues to increase (Cheng et al, 2017; Kilvington and Price, 2017, 2019). This seriously compromises Goffman’s (1959) original model of self-presentation as virtual frontstage performances are not always idealised.…”

“…Figure 1 offers a revised Goffmanian model and attempts to illustrate how online performances are affected through feelings of disinhibition. These differences enhance feelings of courage and freedom (Brown, 2017; Farrington et al, 2015; Keum and Miller, 2018; Kilvington and Price, 2017, 2019; Suler, 2004) and blur virtual frontstages and backstages.…”