TWITTER WILL meet with footballing bodies in the next few weeks to hold talks as they make moves to clamp down on racism following the abuse of black footballers on their site.
The global social networking site, which has over 300 million users worldwide, will be meeting with Manchester United officials in the wake of the abuse of Paul Pogba by users on the online platform after his penalty miss in a Premier League tie against Wolves on Monday night, which ended in a 1-1 draw.
United players, Marcus Rashford and Harry Maguire came out in support of the Pogba, calling for greater security and verification measures to be put in place on Twitter to make it harder for such instances of abuse to happen.
Kick It Out, football’s anti-discrimination body, which also spoke out about the abuse of black players, will also be in meetings with Twitter along with the Professional Footballers Association (PFA) to put a stop to what has become a scourge in the game with the new footballing season only having just begun a week ago.
The abuse of Pogba comes after Chelsea’s Tammy Abraham and Reading striker, Yakou Meite were targeted online after also missing penalties during high stake matches against Liverpool (Super Cup) and Cardiff (Premier League) respectively.
In a statement, Twitter said: “Over the next few weeks, Twitter representatives will meet with Manchester United, Kick It Out and other civil society stakeholders interested in hearing about the proactive work Twitter is doing to address online racist abuse towards certain footballers in the UK. We have always maintained an open and health dialogue with our partners, but we know we need to do more to protect our users. Racist behavior has no place on our platform and we strongly condemn it.”
It added: “We look forward to working more closely with our partners to develop shared solutions to this issue. In the meantime we will continue to proactively monitor the conversation, and take aggressive enforcement action when content violates our rules.”
One hundred thousand accounts were suspended between January and March this year while the numbers of accounts suspended for evading a previous ban have increased by 45 per cent since 2018.
Responding to the abuse of his team mate, Pogba, Manchester United defender, Harry Maguire called for the introduction of driving licences and passports to be used to verify accounts while also making it easier to identify users who are racially abusive.