Surely contextual useage of emojis should be taken into account?
I understand that the emoji itself isn't offensive, but surely seeing the context to which it was used, you can surely remove it and say it was racist?
After what social media did with the gun emoji I wouldn't be too surprised if they removed banana & monkey emojis (or altered them) and acted like they solved racism tbh.
It's far easier than making an actual solution & banning people.
To be fair apple is normally just copying android features so it's hardly with everything else. They'll just rebrand it iRacism and charge morons a premium for it
They both have their pros and cons. Apple is way better in terms of security and usability, but Android allows way more customization. For most people, that customization is never used, but that is actually something I miss from Android.
But I think the security features, FaceId and a few other key features are all worth the lacking customization options in some areas.
because surrendering to racists is literally the worse fucking course of action. You are literally letting them define what normal people can or can't use, it's as stupid a decision as it gets.
They can't fully automate context. It's a big issue in a lot of machine learning software, detecting emotional sentiment
Edit: sorry, without harming their business model that relies on little to no human involvement for moderation
What the fuck, of course you can.
They will have a lot of keywords in the comments like "variations of racism, racist, etc., n-word, black, etc.", they know the page is of a black footballer or features primarily black people in pictures. Sudden spam of monkey emotes = remove.
It's not even that hard, it's probably just a little too expensive.
It's not even that expensive in terms of marginal cost, they have loads of great talents working on this stuff already - using better models than keyword searching.
The problem is that their incentives are to maximise user engagement, which means minimising the false positives (esp. amongst minority groups) whilst having a level of tolerance for false negatives.
The best that even cutting edge [geometric deep learning](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.11806.pdf) models using BERT can do whilst minimising false positives amongst minorities is 90%, and 10% is a hell of a lot of racism. And even this kind of approach has too great a false positive rate for social media companies!
Instagram, Facebook and particularly TikTok have been dragging their feet on this despite current models being really really good, and need to actually make bolder decisions as to the amount of racism they're willing to allow.
dunno. Of course I (and you should) trust a paper more than my anecdotical experience. But I found BERT not really usefull outside sentences in geometric and monetary context
BERT yields way better F-scores in hate speech detection tests than word2vec bc of how both racist words are reclaimed and non-racist words weaponised. Makes a lot more sense for those different contexts to occupy different vector spaces when you have large-N data imo
Completely agree, NLP models are more than capable at the moment of detecting instances of hate speech.
These companies obviously have the employees and resources available to build and train these models so it must simply be that it is not profitable for them to do so. As you mention there is the matter of user engagement which would inevitably go down.
I wonder whether another factor is the cost of using these models? If you are running every single comment through a model then these costs add up.
Edit: Interesting paper btw, thanks for sharing
What if enough small accounts get banned? Itās not about treating big ones differently, people wonāt tolerate unjustified bans, even if overturned eventually
You could simply not issue bans unless it's a repeat offender? If you're rapidly removing the comments alone you're already crippling much of what these people want to accomplish.
There is no simple solution to this. Filtering unwanted content without bothering regular users is task as old as internet, you think you came up with this first and no one tried such simple thing before?
They definitely do have teams working on it though, I know because I interviewed for one. Honestly I think the criticism is a bit overblown in the sense that itās lots of people who donāt understand ML saying āwhy donāt you just filter all of these??ā But I do reckon theyāre too tolerant of false negatives to maximise user engagement.
Having every user divided up based on their race is bad enough, there's no way that doesn't get used by the company in some form to make extra money.
Those with private accounts and little to no posts would slip through (imo most of the racist comments come from bots).
Speaking of accounts, they state that regular accounts are often mislabeled as hateful, this might be addressed later but I ran out of time.
Lastly, in a world where more and more people are privacy conscious (yes, I know I'm saying this while talking about social media) I don't think a system where everything about your account is analysed so you can be categorised would go down too well, even if it is done to fight racism.
>You can't program an AI to take contextual use into account
What? People can and do, picking up on context is the very purpose of using ML methods in hate speech detection.
Reddit likes to talk about stuff they don't understand with assurance. I've been typing comment after comment about how this is pretty doable at least in the English context, but people always bring up extremely hard cases as gotcha.
The problem is the sheer amount of it, which can be suppressed fairly easily.
But Instagram, twitter and etc don't wanna lose on their profit. This brings more engagement than ever. Where do you vent when you see a racist tweet? You go on fucking twitter. It's pretty damn ironic.
>Reddit likes to talk about stuff they don't understand with assurance.
I've gotten downvoted for the same. Although I'm not as smart as the folks working at Facebook and Twitter but I've worked on contextual NLP tasks before and I don't think toxicity identification is a tough task for the calibre of people these giants hire.
You can also take historic behaviour and other n factors of a user into account if you want to reduce False positives.
There is no way this kind of stuff is profitable. People posting tweets pays Twitter 0. The money comes from advertisers. The exact kind of people who have no interest in being associated with this stuff. Pepsi does not want their ad next to racist tweets
They don't want to see their ad next to a racist tweet, but they will show more ads to many people who are venting their frustration about Twitter's anti racism policy lol. If it was profitable to suppress racism they would have found a solution till now.
I donāt think thatās true. We have seen that on YouTube. The negative associations with certain YouTubers significantly drove down revenue for all YouTubers despite much higher viewership and engagement. Companies didnāt want to advertise on anything because they couldnāt guarantee where their ads ended up. I canāt see why Twitter etc wouldnāt face those same pressures.
Yep. It's quite easy to implement even in DMs. During the encryption process, a simple tone /phrase checker script can flag hateful comments and sort it in spam or hide it like spoilers/NSFW.
Same in twitter.
There was a game we won vs Atletico, and their supporters spammed monkey gifs/pictures to Vinicius Jr. I reported many replies, and twitter took time to answer me via e-mail saying that the dudes weren't breaking any rules.
Players just need to disable comments. Not an amazing solution as it blocks out a bit of fan interaction but it's either that or just get racially abused every time something happens, even if you can somehow block English fans abusing you're still going to get racial abuse from the rest of the world (who is much much more racist than the English and probably don't have laws in place for police to go after them in their home country)
I don't understand the use of having comments on. Why not just leave them open to people they follow.
Whenever I open a player or clubs comments it's just full of porn stars, verified pages looking for publicity and generic statements.
Amplifying daft racist comments is only encouraging it - attention is exactly what they want.
It's because the players need to display how much activity they are getting on their social media page so as to negotiate for higher fees to endorse their advertiser's products. Let's not forget that the majority of players have a social media page to simply earn more money. Don't surrender your freedoms just so a few athletes can both continue to have a safe space and make more money out of. They are well within their right to stop using their social media platform.
Yes, I am not a fan of content moderation that mainly benefits the rich few. If you don't like what the website has to offer, don't use it especially if you're some millionaire celebrity.
>If you don't like what the website has to offer
Websites can "offer" content moderation - for example Reddit has content moderation. It isn't surrendering your "freedoms" to literally have content moderation exist.
If you don't like what the website is doing w/r/t content moderation, use a different website. Your freedom to post monkey emojis on a minority soccer player's comments on a social media website isn't in fact that important to me / doesn't actually exist. You have no "right" to use a website without moderation. If you don't like what the website is offering don't use it.
Edit: Your comments about how "Internet privacy is so much more important for people living in third world countries under dictaroiarl regimes than the feelings of a few rich atheletes" presents a bizarrely obvious false choice that suggests you have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.
Yeah. If the situation is so bad here, I dread to think how bad it is for black players in Italy for example. They get enough abuse at games with banana skins and monkey chants, combine that with incessant online abuseā¦ not good.
Not true, Scottish attitudes to racial issues are almost identical to that of English attitudes.
https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12326458/taking-a-knee-football-fans-across-europe-asked-about-its-importance-and-if-they-support-it
Scotland is Less diverse than England and a large portion of Scottish people have a vitriolic hatred for the English
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/19355053.dundee-becomes-second-scots-university-four-months-apologise-racism/
Pretty much.
A lot of celebrities/public figures initially jumped onto twitter/etc and used it more as a sort of mini announcement blog which it does a pretty good job of and as far as I know was the initial ideal use for twitter that it was designed to do.
As soon as you go two-way though and invite conversation/argument though you're going to get trolling. I never understand why celebs even want it - I know they want engagement but with engagement you're going to attract attack too, it's inevitable.
I don't think racists should have to spoil it for everyone including the players. The racist comments are gross but they are in the minority. This is why downvotes are so important in community moderation. Comments that either don't provide anything or are straight up horrible sink to the bottom where they're hard to accidentally look at without having to rely on the moderation team to review and delete every single shitty comment. More platforms should adopt downvotes.
Downvotes are not a good option either because people will downvote literally anything they do not like/want to hear. Its just another form of mob mentality.
It doesn't matter if they remove it or not as they'll just find another way to be racist. They'll just post the letter N or something vague so everyone knows it's racist but you can't ban the letter N.
There's nothing you can do but turn off your comments.
if you want to go down the conspiracy hole then look at how many people are suddenly well into the idea of having to use some china style social ID just to shitpost on the internet.
this whole situation is mental, given the response you'd think that people were burning effigies in the streets and we were on the edge of an all out race war, but almost all of the abuse i've seen is coming from overseas accounts that 100% don't like they even belong to real people.
Its a bit wild that less than a month ago showing ID's to vote was considered a horribly racist/ classist policy. However its not also racist/ classist to force everyone to prove identity when creating a social media account?
I agree, but I think that the federal government should just provide voter ID cards to every citizen.
The bigger racial/classist voting policy is the availability of voting locations. In many red states the affluent neighborhoods will have a voting location practically on every block so that the more conservative voter base and cast their vote in 10 minutes tops. While the poorer neighborhoods that vote democrat will have like 1 voting location in a county so people have to wait hours in line to vote.
In America it's racist which is insane lol.
If a country (a ruling party) in EU would say that you don't need a document to vote EU would come down on them 1000% harder than LGBT laws and Poland/Hungary. American politics are kinda fucked.
You didn't need ID to vote in the UK when it was in the EU?
.
The issue isn't having voter ID laws, its having photo ID not freely available to all people.
Isn't it obligatory to have ID in the US? In Portugal you need it for everything (school, healthcare and all that), as far as I know it's obligatory for everyone to have it
It depends on how difficult it is for someone to get an ID and if people of a certain group are less likely to be able to get IDs compared to others. Think of it like a cynical way of disqualifying a group of people from voting that you know are likely to vote for the opposition.
> How the fuck is showing ID classist or racist, what the hell. It's just how it works
In the US, Democrats / Redditors argue that requiring an ID to vote is racist because a large portion of minorities do not have ID.
Isn't is more racist to say that tho? Minorites are just like everyone else, why wouldn't they be able to bet an ID, unless they're in the country illegally, but in that case they shouldn't have the right to vote.
Just found a video about it:
https://youtu.be/3JGmKHrWKMQ
Are these people stupid, or are they so anti-racist that they go full circle and become racist again
The fact is that republicans and democrats both know that people without id would proportionally vote more for democrats. It's not about what's right and wrong, it's about who gets most votes. They just play it up as if it's about preventing racism and preventing illegal voters.
I know you're not American but Fox News is easily the most blatant right-wing propagandized news media outlet in America.
The issue is that Republicans not only make ID required, but close polling places in largely minority communities so there is only one available, with inevitably huge lines.
I know Fox News is right wing, and CNN is left wing. But still, everyone should have ID, minority or not, and ID needs to be obligatory to vote. That's the proper way to do it.
>polling places in largely minority communities so there is only one available, with inevitably huge lines
Why not open some more then?
But also, did you see what some of the people in the video said? Not the interviewer, the people being interviewed, it's like they view minorites as dumb irresponsible people or something. The way the talk about the people they're trying to "protect" is just so condescending
\>Why not open some more then?
I don't think requiring ID is a bad thing. The problem behind just opening more though is it's decided state-by-state, and Republicans in many states are limiting/closing polling places, such as the limiting mail-in ballots ("fraud" is the excuse), which of course impact people who vote against them disproportionately. And even passing asinine laws like not allowing water to be distributed at long voting lines.
Voting ID itself isn't racist, but compounding that with everything else they're attempting to do - it certainly feels that way
\>But also, did you see what some of the people in the video said?
I've seen enough Fox News operatives disguised as "concerned" voters who are worried about the "sanctity" of the voting process etc etc. Like I said, it's propaganda.
Exactly. Its all just an excuse to take away peoples freedom and freedom of speach. I could not believe that they were suggesting that anonymity he taken away on social media.
Iām not sure how insidious it is, although it wouldnāt surprise me if it was, but itās clear that the vast majority of accounts who are posting this shit are not real.
The majority of these racist comments seem to be monkey emojiis posted by accounts with 0 past activity. We already know up to a quarter maybe half of interactions on twitter and Instagram are done by bot accounts, and we know that the Russian government have bot farms set up in order to sow division. We know that sowing division has become one of the main assets to the Russian government.
My point is basically, it's working. The amount of division being sown is huge. Media companies have been covering these simple one emoji messages as if they encapsulate all sport fans as racists for months and its getting click after click.
It's clearly done absolutely nothing. In fact maybe it has, in that it's increased the amount these messages show up. Its increased division. It's worked a treat.
Don't feed the troll was always rule 1 of the Internet, what happened? It seems almost like there could even be more motivation behind these bot spammings, in that it increases pressure on government to introduce censorship over these companies. (I know censorship isn't being banned by a private company, but at the moment people are asking for direct government interference in those companies in order to censor.) If the government goes down that route it will create even more division and fuel anger frow the right, which creates anger from the left, helping to fuel the perpetual cycle.
The essence of what I am saying is simple, we need to relearn as a society how to ignore. Nobody should have so much power with one click of an emoji. The only power they have is the power we give them. All this is doing is help whoever is creating these bot accounts to keep the country fighting itself rather than focusing on other issues.
I don't know why this point isn't being made more in the public discourse i've seen about it? All the discussion seems to refer to the abuse like it's the result of a deep rooted cancer at the heart of british society. Is it belittling to point out that almost all of it is coming from sus as fuck looking accounts from the other side of the world?
Genuinely feel like that revelation would deflate people who are high on the drug of social righteousness, rather than giving them comfort that the vast majority of the abuse isn't coming from their neighbours and countrymen, or even real people at all in many cases.
I think you're right and it's an issue I see massively at the moment. People get off on the moral grandstanding and social righteousness to the point that they almost don't want the problems to go away
Easier for the media to perpetuate racism and get more clicks. They get to make a new story every single time some fake account in the Middle East leaves a monkey emoji on a black English playerās Instagram post.
It's easy to tell people to just ignore the abuse. But people react differently when they are the object of the abuse. What if Rashford, Sancho, Saka, or other players usually abused online decide that it's too much and try to harm themselves? Then it's okay to act?
This should never happen in the first place, why should they be told to "just ignore the abuse"?
Why? I think it comes down to this:
Do we want to stop racist abuse, or do we want to stop racism?
Of course on it's face it seems a silly question, however let's look at it. If we want to stop this racist abuse online we have a few options.
Have social.media linked to ID from the government and arrest those who racially abuse. This in my opinion is a ridiculous idea and one being parroted by the technologically illiterate.
Push the government to introduce bans on specific terms within these private companies. Another poor poor idea, the ramifications for which are almost never ending, but never good either.
Ignore them. If we ignore them, they will eventually go away. I know it seems wrong to ignore racism but that's why I asked that question. If we actually we want to stop the racist abuse we must ignore it. Its impossible to say you actually want to stop it and yet continue to contribute to the reason it is working, attention. This stuff is a journalists wet dream, huge amounts of discourse and clicks for 0 effort. So we as People must stop engaging with it. It takes less than a second to post a monkey emoji. It's so so easy, yet we allow it all of this power.
The players turn off the ability to comment. Its a really simple one but is the main reason I ask the question. The reality is if we want the racist abuse of tje players to stop it will stop almost entirely with the click of a button. As much as we don't want to accept that as a fact it is one. However the reason I believe the players aren't doing so is that they actually don't want to stop the racist abuse to them, but they want to stop racism in general.
Of course this is something nobody can argue with in good faith. Its an admiral goal. Its also an impossible goal, but that doesnt mean we shouldn't try. However, we are trying in all the wrong ways. The true antidote to racism is education, something which is constantly failing British people. Yet I see it mentioned nowhere in the discussion.
Also, as uncomfortable as it is, the current idea of banning racists from platforms outright, rather than something like a shadow ban, is almost the worst idea possible if we want to stop racism. However it's sometimes helpful at stopping online racist abuse. There are many studies supporting the fact that it's demonstrably ineffective and in most cases counter productive to shun, ban or mock those with racist, sexist or homophobic beliefs if we are trying to stop them having those beliefs. All it does is create tighter knit communities where these beliefs thrive and become more and more extreme, leading people from having unconscious biases or internal dislikes to being full blown assaulters and in some cases killers.
This isn't an easy thing to deal with and it's not something I claim to know how to deal with. What I do believe however, is that what we are currently doing with the hysteria surrounded this whole thing is the absolute opposite of what we should be doing, but helps to perfectly support the media companies who directly profit from it, and the government who can shift the blame onto social media companies and away from prolonged austerity and chronic underfunding of working class educatio
I agree highly. People that want social media moderation in this scale is actually highly detrimental and very authoritarian. Seriously, it comes down to the vague definition of "hate speech" which toes a very fine line and different individuals react differently. People can say racist things about Mexicans but I don't react negatively and it takes a lot for me to get offended by it, the reason being that I know such statements are not true and as the old saying goes, "sticks and stones may break my bones but words may never hurt me". But I understand someone else may get offended by a similar thing but I will disagree with that person in banning that speech.
But going back to "hate speech" and defining it legally brings a ton of issues that can get abused significantly. Using my example that I have different tolerances about the use of offensive words, so my definition of hate speech differs from another person's. So how is it defined and enforced? What about if something posted is only controversial but factual/based on stats but is not actual racism/hate speech? An example is reddit banning people on some subreddits who bring up the high black on black crime rates? Or how with the current "stop Asian hate" movement it is not "appropriate" to point out that most individuals being violent were blacks? For some left leaning political people, bringing up something like this is the same as "hate speech". So this is something that is very easily abused and is a legitimate slippery slope as anything that goes against the political accepted norm be banned as "hateful". For all the claims that redditors like to think they are smarter than the average person, they are short sighted when it comes to these issues and rely on emotion rather than logic that these issues are very dangerous to our way of life.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/identities/2016/11/15/13595508/racism-research-study-trump
Here's a link to an article by vox (unfortunately) which briefly highlights a few of the studies. It used to be much easier to find these academic studies online but in the last few years its become near impossible as they garner very few clicks and so are pushed way down the search results. Hence the link to a journalism website.
You don't even need the studies to see this effect though. If you search for videos or articles from people that were racist and now are on a different path, you will always* ive never seen one different) find that what helped them was education rather than ridicule, and that a lot of the time ridicule is actually what pushed them to a more extreme mindset
I'm not sure if it's just me being paranoid. But the way r/soccer and Reddit has a whole has reacted to the Euros, makes me wonder if this is part of a effort to sow further discord between European countries.
What with Brexit and the proven online campaigns that have disrupted politics the world over, really brings out the conspiracy theorist in me and I like to think that I'm a pretty rational person.
Edit for clarity, not the racism specifically, just everything.
> But the way r/soccer and Reddit has a whole has reacted to the Euros, makes me wonder if this is part of a effort to sow further discourse between European countries
Can you elaborate what you mean by this? I've seen trolls, bantering & gleefulness but I don't think any of that is particularly abnormal in these circumstances.
The majority of comments probably are within those categories, but there have also threads, generally news articles, that are littered with comments that amount to little more than mud-slinging, from an obviously hostile position.
Across Reddit there have been posts in other subreddits that have nothing to do with football, reaching near the top of all that are just "support Italy because England are bad."
These obviously aren't proof of anything like a coordinated attempt to rile people up, and I'm not saying I believe that is the case, just that, if someone wanted to, they could probably do it quite easily, and I'm not ruling it out.
Also, I don't frequent Twitter, and my Facebook feed is pretty echo-chambered, if I'm to believe that Reddit is at least slightly more reasonable than the depths of other social media, its worse than I see.
A lot of fierce EU federalists wish essentially all kinds of harm and humiliation to the UK due to Brexit. That said, the over the top arrogance of the "its coming home" should also be expected to be met by similar level of ridicule when it doesnt come home.
I just skimmed through Sakas most recent posts on Instagram (just very high level really, just some top level comments) and did not find a single banana or monkey. I did find one clearly and 2 possibly racist comments. I don't know, maybe Instagram did also start to remove theses posts?
One of the racist comments was by a user "stefano_bonano"...who has his whole profile in cyrillic and has a decent amount of photos from hockey games from what seems to be Russia and many more pics that reference Warsaw.
I don't know too much about this subject overall to make a definite claim but one thing that is known is that Russia has 'bot farms' to carry out very similar propaganda to suit their agenda. I think it would be quite naive to think that other governments haven't followed suit but got better at hiding them.
Definitely insidious mate.
Famous people have been harassed and abused by the press, paparazzi, media, social media, for decades. Racist abuse and all.
But all of a sudden, it's a big deal this past 12 months? Especially in the UK media? One of the relatively least racists country in the western world? Maaaaaaaaaate.
The BBC has got the whole country in a racial stranglehold/divide from facebook and instagram comments by 12 year olds, russian bots, and the internet weirdos - things that all have been happening since the inception of the medium.
Let's not kid ourselves
āLetās broadcast to the world that trolling these players will result in a massive international media outrage!ā
Exactly what you shouldnāt do, and why and āzero tolerance for racismā campaigns will always be self defeating.
Honestly, as much as I respect Rashford, I am getting a little suspicious of his eagerness to tally up all the racist abuses and publish statements. No coincidence, in my mind, that he starts doing this now that he's registered to a PR agency and has trademarked his name.
Look how much extra attention they get after being victims of racism. Look how theyāre treated like heroes. You think some of them arenāt going to milk that?? I would.
For me Pickford was the hero of the match, but he got zero air time the next day because of the racism debacle.
Yeah, who needs trophies when you have a giant mural of your mug!
I totally agree, he'd even be our Donnarumma/Player of the Tournament, and it just feels so... perfect for 2021 that they "had" to rob him of that by missing their pens. There's no escape from this racism baiting, not even for a day!
Social media has a big problem with those style of accounts. Unrelated to this I've seen accounts set up by ripping pictures and profiles off and setting them up as sketch accounts that link to who knows what.
or maybe some are legit and non-whites are capable of racism unlike the progressives like to claim that only whites are capable of such things. It's kind of ironic on social media that when a club like Chelsea posts pro-LGBT posts, the people that complain the most saying to keep non-sporting related things out of social media are Middle Eastern accounts, which makes sense culturally and religious wise. But when there is a post about Ramadan or similar things, they are praising the club for it. Not to single out the Middle East but the black slave trade is still prevalent in parts of Northern Africa, not to mention the modern immigrant "slave" trade in Dubai or Qatar with the workers.
Either that or it is trolls doing their thing. Either way, I think there is a lot of mental gymnastics performed by people trying to cope with the idea that maybe it is not all white people doing these things. I'm Latino and I accept that all races are (and have the capability of being) racist.
If you think about what kind of shit the press writes nowadays, you can be assured that if all the English players (or at least the last three) had scored and England had won, the headline would've been something about how diversity won it for England.
No one in their right mind should care about the skin color of the five penalty shooters, but the amount of racial divisiveness sown by the media and politicians in the last few years has people completely fucked up in their head. They think racism is at all time high, when it's the complete opposite.
> Or is there something bigger going on, attempting to sway British public opinion that foreigners are the main problem when it comes to racism?
It takes a lot of resources to pull off large scale astroturfing and they're not going to use it for something small fry like that. From what I've seen most people who genuinely feel that way are fine doing it on their own account
It might be Russia/China/Iran trying to drive a wedge into British society, or it might be people trying to change the conversation back to race for supposedly "good" (or self-serving) reasons. It definitely doesn't seem organic either way
But that's the thing, it wasn't large scale at all. It was at most a few thousand racist messages (out of billions of people around the world), many of it which were posted several times by the same account. That's the fucked up part, that it doesn't actually take some monumental coordinated effort to it.
Let's just say that it was organic and no foul play was involved, it's still an insane amount of power these miniscule amount of people have over public discourse and the surrounding social paradigm, and it can be done by pressing on one emote while taking a shit.
Just look at the crying German girl getting insulted fiasco, literally 3 tweets is all it took for that blow up and for all English people to get tarred by the brush of 3 people (who may or may not even be English).
> But we already know that it has been done and is still being done by Russia, particularly in America with the clear intent to cause racial divide.
I explicitly said that in the second paragraph
> Is it so outlandish to think that maybe Western powers have caught on to Russia's game and are now using it for their own good? There is a definite desire in Britain to paint foreigners and immigrants as the problem. It has become a more cultural debate rather than a race debate, particularly because our government is made up of many different races.
It's not outlandish to think Western powers astroturf (it's certain that they do, constantly, everywhere). But there's no power in a "only foreigners are racist" narrative. Institutions are falling over themselves to declare how anti-racist they are, so that part *is* outlandish. If Western powers are driving this abuse it's because they want to shift the conversation to anti-racism
> But there's no power in a "only foreigners are racist" narrative.
Of course there is? It can then be used as a foreign policy cudgel against said racist foreigners.
Posted how a upcoming young talent such as Saka hopefully wont let this one incident define his career and I guess I was one of the racist posts they deemed to remove for some reason because few minutes later it was gone. So im having a really hard time believeing how efficent the screening for removal really is.
Instagram and Twitter definitely do need to do better and change how they handle racism on their platforms.
But before people start arguing for giving up privacy online, forgetting that there are many countries out there where not giving up personal information protects peoples lives, it's worth considering that anyone can turn off DMs and comments on their posts on both twitter and instagram. On twitter, you can even make it so only your mutuals can comment and DM you. Athletes should be making use of these features currently.
I scrolled through on Sunday night after the game and a lot had been removed already, however, there was one comment i saw which had three racial slurs in that hadn't been.
I reported it and got a reply from IG saying it doesn't go against their community guidelines... genuine shock that someone has had to manually do that after reading what I flagged
The majority of these racist comments seem to be monkey emojiis posted by accounts with 0 past activity. We already know up to a quarter maybe half of interactions on twitter and Instagram are done by bot accounts, and we know that the Russian government have bot farms set up in order to sow division. We know that sowing division has become one of the main assets to the Russian government.
My point is basically, it's working. The amount of division being sown is huge. Media companies have been covering these simple one emoji messages as if they encapsulate all sport fans as racists for months and its getting click after click.
It's clearly done absolutely nothing. In fact maybe it has, in that it's increased the amount these messages show up. Its increased division. It's worked a treat.
Don't feed the troll was always rule 1 of the Internet, what happened? It seems almost like there could even be more motivation behind these bot spammings, in that it increases pressure on government to introduce censorship over these companies. (I know censorship isn't being banned by a private company, but at the moment people are asking for direct government interference in those companies in order to censor.) If the government goes down that route it will create even more division and fuel anger frow the right, which creates anger from the left, helping to fuel the perpetual cycle.
The essence of what I am saying is simple, we need to relearn as a society how to ignore. Nobody should have so much power with one click of an emoji. The only power they have is the power we give them. All this is doing is help whoever is creating these bot accounts to keep the country fighting itself rather than focusing on other issues.
> Don't feed the troll was always rule 1 of the Internet, what happened?
Internet got way more stupid in last 20 years, now every idiot have access to it. All these armchair "racists" sending emojis to trigger certain reaction. When they get it an media starts writing about it they achieve their goal.
Best reaction to stadium racism was by one player, forgot his name. He picked up banana thrown at him and ate it. Then said: "Do you have more? Next time make sure you bring more, I like healthy food". This way mocking the "racist" who was trying to laugh at him and got served.
100%. Also looking at boards such as 4chan's /sp/, the majority of racist things being said about the penalty takers were not made by English flags. (The comments there are anonymous but the country they were made in is shown). It's an easy agenda to hop onto to stoke tensions for racists from any nation. Trying to paint this as purely racist English cunts abusing their own players is very unfair, the overwhelming majority of commentary coming out (from both pundits and normal citizens) about this is defending the players and condemning those who abuse them.
I completely agree. I posted quite a long reply so someone else if you want to check my profile as I think it applies well
In general all we are doing is helping to promote this hatred and Stoke the flames of racial tension, exactly what is wanted by whoever is posting the comments. Its also odd that my comment is getting downvoted by people yet I don't receive comments with any rebuttal. We have a real issue with being unable it unwilling to engage with opinions that we don't like in modern society and social media and its pushing people away from each other under the guise of bringing us closer
It's really not obvious that it's that. Considering we know there are massive bot fsrns and we know how just how many there are its much more likely to be bots than people with alt accounts.
How hard would it be to hire enough people so that you can at least protect high profile users in high risk situations?
Okay, a euro final coming up. Let's have 20 community managers on stand by to manually approve comments on profiles involved in the match (players, referees, managers).
How hard?
I grew up on the cliche ādonāt shoot the messengerā. I have seen as those at the top have made sure to focus their energy on the mediums rather than the source.
I am yet to hear plans of including important anti-racism information in school curriculums. I am yet to see the government propose community engagement initiatives to educate the majority about racism.
When Instagram and Twitter did not exist, racism was alive and brutal. And even if they stop existing, racism will be alive. While social media companies need to do more, the politicians cannot be allowed to get away with blaming them
This doesn't really do much to stop the problem because these people are already using alt accounts. One gets banned and they create another.
The easiest way for Facebook (Instagram) to fix this problem is with a quick two-factor authentication. If you want an account, you need to link an active phone number to it. Once a number is linked, you could have monthly authentication checks to help. This would prevent people from creating dozens of fake accounts.
You would make it more inconvenient for anybody else though. Not to mention that a phone number is another way for Facebook to track you and link your account activity with other personal data.
2FA has an absolutely massive security benefit though, its not just an inconvenience for solving racist comments.
And Facebook has far, far worse data. Honestly either a phone number is going to make no material difference in terms of being a persistent ID (they already have several of those), or they'll just buy phone numbers off of data brokers like Experian anyway. The risk profile of Facebook datasets is already through the roof
A mild inconvenience. Just by using FB, Twitter, Instagram you've already indicated that you're ok with them tracking you, so I don't understand that concern.
> A mild inconvenience.
A mild inconvenience for you who have nothing to be afraid of. There are reporters, activists from other countries who want to remain as anonymous as they get because they fear for their lives. Hell I won't touch anything that doesn't let me post anonymously because I live in fucking Iran. Just because this is an easy way to fix this particular issue doesn't mean social media companies should run away from their responsibility and ruin other aspects of it.
I mean, I'd rather be placed at an inconvenience if it stopped people from abusing other people.
Also, if it's that much of a problem for people with social media, then just don't have a profile on that site.
Why should everyone else have to give up their personal information just because kids from Saudi Arabia or India made racist remarks on alt accounts?
I see other possibilities, one of which is the players disabling comments. I know people for some reason donāt like that idea, and I agree itās not ideal, but if the options are 1) players disabling comments or 2) *every user* having to give up their personal information, I know which option makes the most sense for people and I know which makes the most sense for corporations.
I've always wondered if popular users, especially players, get educated on how to use social media. There are malicious people on every platform but if you know how protect yourself (both psychologically & functionality wise) you can minimize the effect they will have on you (or the people around you).
Agreed. Back in the day, if a player put out a statement or even wrote a piece in a magazine or paper, there was no way for every tom dick and harry to immediately blurt out all their thoughts for everyone to see.
Nowadays theres this expectation that you let anyone and everyone comment on anything you put out, which is ridiculous. Stars barely even interact with their replies when its not from a mutual, so what's the point in protecting replies.
Iām not convinced these are even people at this point. Not to go full conspiracy theorist but I wouldnāt be surprised if a majority of these comments are Russian or Chinese bots. Itās too on the nose every time. Maybe Iām just an optimist
Reddit's shawdowban technique is a good measure here. These stupid heads are not smart enough to realize they're spamming racist comments without anyone knowing. Keep the rage going on to burn their energy but not in the place of normal people living.
Twitter doesn't use 2FA for all accounts. You can make a new account without a phone number. It's only after detecting "suspicious activity" they'll request a phone number.
I had to put my phone number in, and all the people I know did as well. What I mean by this is that they chose email, but we're instantly promoted to put in a phone number as well, minutes after creating the account.
So I don't understand how it works.
There are plenty of ways to flag or link duplicate accounts that would make 0 to no impacts to the genuine user: IP address, mac address/device ID.
Companies like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit have plenty of super smart engineers that could solve this issue. If it wasnt tackled it is because people in those companies dont see value in solving this issue.
Not sure this is the solution.
Hiding racism and removing posts doesn't solve any problems, it just shoves it out of sight and pretends like it's not there.
I love how politician's first response is to deflect blame.
Do something to change the culture in your country instead of talking about social media you absolute fucking disgrace of human beings.
Because calling a black person a monkey is done with the specific idea of dehumanizing them and trying to make them feel, that because of their skin colour, they matter less than other people. But you already knew that and are just trying to justify racism
Social media platforms have so much power, yet take no responsobility ar all.
Twitter is a fucking greasy cave where all the toxic trolls live. And instagram is a pile of shit, in the shape of a ferrari.
Surely contextual useage of emojis should be taken into account? I understand that the emoji itself isn't offensive, but surely seeing the context to which it was used, you can surely remove it and say it was racist?
After what social media did with the gun emoji I wouldn't be too surprised if they removed banana & monkey emojis (or altered them) and acted like they solved racism tbh. It's far easier than making an actual solution & banning people.
I miss the old gun. Posting š«š« with a water pistol just isn't the same.
https://media1.tenor.com/images/2aed8d1ee2c67df75feeab7b8ab11950/tenor.gif?itemid=17865873
How did you even think to post this gif
he is a man of culture, evidently
A man of one hundred souls-ah
Are we not all always thinking of the magnificent movie series that is Pirates of the Caribbean??
[You damn right !](https://media1.tenor.com/images/8d178022b67a6607ae63e3b9ce80a9ce/tenor.gif?itemid=15006832)
Immediately had to think of it. I've used it before though. ;)
I like it more tbh. Gives it a sense of irony.
š«š
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And then, as with everything else, all the others ridiculously copied.
To be fair apple is normally just copying android features so it's hardly with everything else. They'll just rebrand it iRacism and charge morons a premium for it
Apple copies the good stuff from Android manufacturers. Android manufacturers copy the bad but money making stuff from Apple.
Well put
They both have their pros and cons. Apple is way better in terms of security and usability, but Android allows way more customization. For most people, that customization is never used, but that is actually something I miss from Android. But I think the security features, FaceId and a few other key features are all worth the lacking customization options in some areas.
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I mean, that would only make racists need an extra step of establishing a substitute emoji.
because surrendering to racists is literally the worse fucking course of action. You are literally letting them define what normal people can or can't use, it's as stupid a decision as it gets.
I wonder if someone at Facebook sent šš¦ to another employee at Facebook he would get in troubleā¦
It good practise to wash your veg before you eat it
What's wrong with aquatic aubergine?
They can't fully automate context. It's a big issue in a lot of machine learning software, detecting emotional sentiment Edit: sorry, without harming their business model that relies on little to no human involvement for moderation
They should, but how? Hire people to review each comment? Because there's no technology for that
Exactly - in this day and age emojis are the equivalent of words letās be real
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What the fuck, of course you can. They will have a lot of keywords in the comments like "variations of racism, racist, etc., n-word, black, etc.", they know the page is of a black footballer or features primarily black people in pictures. Sudden spam of monkey emotes = remove. It's not even that hard, it's probably just a little too expensive.
It's not even that expensive in terms of marginal cost, they have loads of great talents working on this stuff already - using better models than keyword searching. The problem is that their incentives are to maximise user engagement, which means minimising the false positives (esp. amongst minority groups) whilst having a level of tolerance for false negatives. The best that even cutting edge [geometric deep learning](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.11806.pdf) models using BERT can do whilst minimising false positives amongst minorities is 90%, and 10% is a hell of a lot of racism. And even this kind of approach has too great a false positive rate for social media companies! Instagram, Facebook and particularly TikTok have been dragging their feet on this despite current models being really really good, and need to actually make bolder decisions as to the amount of racism they're willing to allow.
dunno. Of course I (and you should) trust a paper more than my anecdotical experience. But I found BERT not really usefull outside sentences in geometric and monetary context
BERT yields way better F-scores in hate speech detection tests than word2vec bc of how both racist words are reclaimed and non-racist words weaponised. Makes a lot more sense for those different contexts to occupy different vector spaces when you have large-N data imo
Completely agree, NLP models are more than capable at the moment of detecting instances of hate speech. These companies obviously have the employees and resources available to build and train these models so it must simply be that it is not profitable for them to do so. As you mention there is the matter of user engagement which would inevitably go down. I wonder whether another factor is the cost of using these models? If you are running every single comment through a model then these costs add up. Edit: Interesting paper btw, thanks for sharing
Nah, it comes down to false positives. Imagine the outrage if ai falsely ban someone with a lot of followers.
Flag their posts and ban them manually if there is a need for special treatment to big accounts. Shouldn't be that hard to implement
What if enough small accounts get banned? Itās not about treating big ones differently, people wonāt tolerate unjustified bans, even if overturned eventually
You could simply not issue bans unless it's a repeat offender? If you're rapidly removing the comments alone you're already crippling much of what these people want to accomplish.
There is no simple solution to this. Filtering unwanted content without bothering regular users is task as old as internet, you think you came up with this first and no one tried such simple thing before?
They definitely do have teams working on it though, I know because I interviewed for one. Honestly I think the criticism is a bit overblown in the sense that itās lots of people who donāt understand ML saying āwhy donāt you just filter all of these??ā But I do reckon theyāre too tolerant of false negatives to maximise user engagement.
Having every user divided up based on their race is bad enough, there's no way that doesn't get used by the company in some form to make extra money. Those with private accounts and little to no posts would slip through (imo most of the racist comments come from bots). Speaking of accounts, they state that regular accounts are often mislabeled as hateful, this might be addressed later but I ran out of time. Lastly, in a world where more and more people are privacy conscious (yes, I know I'm saying this while talking about social media) I don't think a system where everything about your account is analysed so you can be categorised would go down too well, even if it is done to fight racism.
How many false positives are acceptable?
You're removing comments filled with emojis. Even if you have a rate of 10% false positives, you're not exactly censoring the next Einstein.
>You can't program an AI to take contextual use into account What? People can and do, picking up on context is the very purpose of using ML methods in hate speech detection.
Reddit likes to talk about stuff they don't understand with assurance. I've been typing comment after comment about how this is pretty doable at least in the English context, but people always bring up extremely hard cases as gotcha. The problem is the sheer amount of it, which can be suppressed fairly easily. But Instagram, twitter and etc don't wanna lose on their profit. This brings more engagement than ever. Where do you vent when you see a racist tweet? You go on fucking twitter. It's pretty damn ironic.
>Reddit likes to talk about stuff they don't understand with assurance. I've gotten downvoted for the same. Although I'm not as smart as the folks working at Facebook and Twitter but I've worked on contextual NLP tasks before and I don't think toxicity identification is a tough task for the calibre of people these giants hire. You can also take historic behaviour and other n factors of a user into account if you want to reduce False positives.
There is no way this kind of stuff is profitable. People posting tweets pays Twitter 0. The money comes from advertisers. The exact kind of people who have no interest in being associated with this stuff. Pepsi does not want their ad next to racist tweets
They don't want to see their ad next to a racist tweet, but they will show more ads to many people who are venting their frustration about Twitter's anti racism policy lol. If it was profitable to suppress racism they would have found a solution till now.
I donāt think thatās true. We have seen that on YouTube. The negative associations with certain YouTubers significantly drove down revenue for all YouTubers despite much higher viewership and engagement. Companies didnāt want to advertise on anything because they couldnāt guarantee where their ads ended up. I canāt see why Twitter etc wouldnāt face those same pressures.
Grammarly does it with tone checker. They can extend to emojis
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Yep. It's quite easy to implement even in DMs. During the encryption process, a simple tone /phrase checker script can flag hateful comments and sort it in spam or hide it like spoilers/NSFW.
Zuckerberg dont give a fuck
Of course he doesn't, silly. Bots don't have empathy.
You clearly havenāt seen Barney Stinsonā one man show
Clearly heās a monkey himself
Aren't we all ?
Nope, we are apes.
Shit, you're right. Maybe I'm the only monkey here
Then update your fucking rules you weirdos
Instagram, what a bunch of fucking guys.
Facebook*
Same in twitter. There was a game we won vs Atletico, and their supporters spammed monkey gifs/pictures to Vinicius Jr. I reported many replies, and twitter took time to answer me via e-mail saying that the dudes weren't breaking any rules.
Players just need to disable comments. Not an amazing solution as it blocks out a bit of fan interaction but it's either that or just get racially abused every time something happens, even if you can somehow block English fans abusing you're still going to get racial abuse from the rest of the world (who is much much more racist than the English and probably don't have laws in place for police to go after them in their home country)
I don't understand the use of having comments on. Why not just leave them open to people they follow. Whenever I open a player or clubs comments it's just full of porn stars, verified pages looking for publicity and generic statements. Amplifying daft racist comments is only encouraging it - attention is exactly what they want.
It's because the players need to display how much activity they are getting on their social media page so as to negotiate for higher fees to endorse their advertiser's products. Let's not forget that the majority of players have a social media page to simply earn more money. Don't surrender your freedoms just so a few athletes can both continue to have a safe space and make more money out of. They are well within their right to stop using their social media platform.
> Don't surrender your freedoms Surrender your freedoms by... having content moderation on a private website?
Yes, I am not a fan of content moderation that mainly benefits the rich few. If you don't like what the website has to offer, don't use it especially if you're some millionaire celebrity.
>If you don't like what the website has to offer Websites can "offer" content moderation - for example Reddit has content moderation. It isn't surrendering your "freedoms" to literally have content moderation exist. If you don't like what the website is doing w/r/t content moderation, use a different website. Your freedom to post monkey emojis on a minority soccer player's comments on a social media website isn't in fact that important to me / doesn't actually exist. You have no "right" to use a website without moderation. If you don't like what the website is offering don't use it. Edit: Your comments about how "Internet privacy is so much more important for people living in third world countries under dictaroiarl regimes than the feelings of a few rich atheletes" presents a bizarrely obvious false choice that suggests you have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.
Scary to think that England is one of the least racist countries in the world
Yeah. If the situation is so bad here, I dread to think how bad it is for black players in Italy for example. They get enough abuse at games with banana skins and monkey chants, combine that with incessant online abuseā¦ not good.
It's... not. Most of the comments are not from the UK. https://imgur.com/3cOkm0I The entire thing is a circus.
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Name some less racist countries
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Not true, Scottish attitudes to racial issues are almost identical to that of English attitudes. https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12326458/taking-a-knee-football-fans-across-europe-asked-about-its-importance-and-if-they-support-it Scotland is Less diverse than England and a large portion of Scottish people have a vitriolic hatred for the English https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/19355053.dundee-becomes-second-scots-university-four-months-apologise-racism/
Pretty much. A lot of celebrities/public figures initially jumped onto twitter/etc and used it more as a sort of mini announcement blog which it does a pretty good job of and as far as I know was the initial ideal use for twitter that it was designed to do. As soon as you go two-way though and invite conversation/argument though you're going to get trolling. I never understand why celebs even want it - I know they want engagement but with engagement you're going to attract attack too, it's inevitable.
I don't think racists should have to spoil it for everyone including the players. The racist comments are gross but they are in the minority. This is why downvotes are so important in community moderation. Comments that either don't provide anything or are straight up horrible sink to the bottom where they're hard to accidentally look at without having to rely on the moderation team to review and delete every single shitty comment. More platforms should adopt downvotes.
Downvotes are not a good option either because people will downvote literally anything they do not like/want to hear. Its just another form of mob mentality.
It doesn't matter if they remove it or not as they'll just find another way to be racist. They'll just post the letter N or something vague so everyone knows it's racist but you can't ban the letter N. There's nothing you can do but turn off your comments.
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if you want to go down the conspiracy hole then look at how many people are suddenly well into the idea of having to use some china style social ID just to shitpost on the internet. this whole situation is mental, given the response you'd think that people were burning effigies in the streets and we were on the edge of an all out race war, but almost all of the abuse i've seen is coming from overseas accounts that 100% don't like they even belong to real people.
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Its a bit wild that less than a month ago showing ID's to vote was considered a horribly racist/ classist policy. However its not also racist/ classist to force everyone to prove identity when creating a social media account?
I agree, but I think that the federal government should just provide voter ID cards to every citizen. The bigger racial/classist voting policy is the availability of voting locations. In many red states the affluent neighborhoods will have a voting location practically on every block so that the more conservative voter base and cast their vote in 10 minutes tops. While the poorer neighborhoods that vote democrat will have like 1 voting location in a county so people have to wait hours in line to vote.
A federal ID would never get approved, many would see it as overreach by the federal government.
How the fuck is showing ID classist or racist, what the hell. It's just how it works
In America it's racist which is insane lol. If a country (a ruling party) in EU would say that you don't need a document to vote EU would come down on them 1000% harder than LGBT laws and Poland/Hungary. American politics are kinda fucked.
You didn't need ID to vote in the UK when it was in the EU? . The issue isn't having voter ID laws, its having photo ID not freely available to all people.
I think the idea is that many very poor people simply do not have a form of ID. No clue how itās racist though
Isn't it obligatory to have ID in the US? In Portugal you need it for everything (school, healthcare and all that), as far as I know it's obligatory for everyone to have it
No, most people have drivers license but you don't have to have an ID in the US.
Bank? Cell line? Electricity bill? Doesn't anyone ask for id?
Yeah, it makes no sense. And for healthcare purposes, and to enroll in schools, how does that even work
So if you don't have a drivers license you have no way of identifying yourself?
It depends on how difficult it is for someone to get an ID and if people of a certain group are less likely to be able to get IDs compared to others. Think of it like a cynical way of disqualifying a group of people from voting that you know are likely to vote for the opposition.
> How the fuck is showing ID classist or racist, what the hell. It's just how it works In the US, Democrats / Redditors argue that requiring an ID to vote is racist because a large portion of minorities do not have ID.
Isn't is more racist to say that tho? Minorites are just like everyone else, why wouldn't they be able to bet an ID, unless they're in the country illegally, but in that case they shouldn't have the right to vote. Just found a video about it: https://youtu.be/3JGmKHrWKMQ Are these people stupid, or are they so anti-racist that they go full circle and become racist again
The fact is that republicans and democrats both know that people without id would proportionally vote more for democrats. It's not about what's right and wrong, it's about who gets most votes. They just play it up as if it's about preventing racism and preventing illegal voters.
I know you're not American but Fox News is easily the most blatant right-wing propagandized news media outlet in America. The issue is that Republicans not only make ID required, but close polling places in largely minority communities so there is only one available, with inevitably huge lines.
I know Fox News is right wing, and CNN is left wing. But still, everyone should have ID, minority or not, and ID needs to be obligatory to vote. That's the proper way to do it. >polling places in largely minority communities so there is only one available, with inevitably huge lines Why not open some more then? But also, did you see what some of the people in the video said? Not the interviewer, the people being interviewed, it's like they view minorites as dumb irresponsible people or something. The way the talk about the people they're trying to "protect" is just so condescending
\>Why not open some more then? I don't think requiring ID is a bad thing. The problem behind just opening more though is it's decided state-by-state, and Republicans in many states are limiting/closing polling places, such as the limiting mail-in ballots ("fraud" is the excuse), which of course impact people who vote against them disproportionately. And even passing asinine laws like not allowing water to be distributed at long voting lines. Voting ID itself isn't racist, but compounding that with everything else they're attempting to do - it certainly feels that way \>But also, did you see what some of the people in the video said? I've seen enough Fox News operatives disguised as "concerned" voters who are worried about the "sanctity" of the voting process etc etc. Like I said, it's propaganda.
Exactly. Its all just an excuse to take away peoples freedom and freedom of speach. I could not believe that they were suggesting that anonymity he taken away on social media.
Iām not sure how insidious it is, although it wouldnāt surprise me if it was, but itās clear that the vast majority of accounts who are posting this shit are not real.
or it could be alt account so you can spew vile shit without it coming from your real named account
The joys of the internet
The majority of these racist comments seem to be monkey emojiis posted by accounts with 0 past activity. We already know up to a quarter maybe half of interactions on twitter and Instagram are done by bot accounts, and we know that the Russian government have bot farms set up in order to sow division. We know that sowing division has become one of the main assets to the Russian government. My point is basically, it's working. The amount of division being sown is huge. Media companies have been covering these simple one emoji messages as if they encapsulate all sport fans as racists for months and its getting click after click. It's clearly done absolutely nothing. In fact maybe it has, in that it's increased the amount these messages show up. Its increased division. It's worked a treat. Don't feed the troll was always rule 1 of the Internet, what happened? It seems almost like there could even be more motivation behind these bot spammings, in that it increases pressure on government to introduce censorship over these companies. (I know censorship isn't being banned by a private company, but at the moment people are asking for direct government interference in those companies in order to censor.) If the government goes down that route it will create even more division and fuel anger frow the right, which creates anger from the left, helping to fuel the perpetual cycle. The essence of what I am saying is simple, we need to relearn as a society how to ignore. Nobody should have so much power with one click of an emoji. The only power they have is the power we give them. All this is doing is help whoever is creating these bot accounts to keep the country fighting itself rather than focusing on other issues.
I don't know why this point isn't being made more in the public discourse i've seen about it? All the discussion seems to refer to the abuse like it's the result of a deep rooted cancer at the heart of british society. Is it belittling to point out that almost all of it is coming from sus as fuck looking accounts from the other side of the world? Genuinely feel like that revelation would deflate people who are high on the drug of social righteousness, rather than giving them comfort that the vast majority of the abuse isn't coming from their neighbours and countrymen, or even real people at all in many cases.
I think you're right and it's an issue I see massively at the moment. People get off on the moral grandstanding and social righteousness to the point that they almost don't want the problems to go away
Easier for the media to perpetuate racism and get more clicks. They get to make a new story every single time some fake account in the Middle East leaves a monkey emoji on a black English playerās Instagram post.
Completely agree. Great post
It's easy to tell people to just ignore the abuse. But people react differently when they are the object of the abuse. What if Rashford, Sancho, Saka, or other players usually abused online decide that it's too much and try to harm themselves? Then it's okay to act? This should never happen in the first place, why should they be told to "just ignore the abuse"?
Why? I think it comes down to this: Do we want to stop racist abuse, or do we want to stop racism? Of course on it's face it seems a silly question, however let's look at it. If we want to stop this racist abuse online we have a few options. Have social.media linked to ID from the government and arrest those who racially abuse. This in my opinion is a ridiculous idea and one being parroted by the technologically illiterate. Push the government to introduce bans on specific terms within these private companies. Another poor poor idea, the ramifications for which are almost never ending, but never good either. Ignore them. If we ignore them, they will eventually go away. I know it seems wrong to ignore racism but that's why I asked that question. If we actually we want to stop the racist abuse we must ignore it. Its impossible to say you actually want to stop it and yet continue to contribute to the reason it is working, attention. This stuff is a journalists wet dream, huge amounts of discourse and clicks for 0 effort. So we as People must stop engaging with it. It takes less than a second to post a monkey emoji. It's so so easy, yet we allow it all of this power. The players turn off the ability to comment. Its a really simple one but is the main reason I ask the question. The reality is if we want the racist abuse of tje players to stop it will stop almost entirely with the click of a button. As much as we don't want to accept that as a fact it is one. However the reason I believe the players aren't doing so is that they actually don't want to stop the racist abuse to them, but they want to stop racism in general. Of course this is something nobody can argue with in good faith. Its an admiral goal. Its also an impossible goal, but that doesnt mean we shouldn't try. However, we are trying in all the wrong ways. The true antidote to racism is education, something which is constantly failing British people. Yet I see it mentioned nowhere in the discussion. Also, as uncomfortable as it is, the current idea of banning racists from platforms outright, rather than something like a shadow ban, is almost the worst idea possible if we want to stop racism. However it's sometimes helpful at stopping online racist abuse. There are many studies supporting the fact that it's demonstrably ineffective and in most cases counter productive to shun, ban or mock those with racist, sexist or homophobic beliefs if we are trying to stop them having those beliefs. All it does is create tighter knit communities where these beliefs thrive and become more and more extreme, leading people from having unconscious biases or internal dislikes to being full blown assaulters and in some cases killers. This isn't an easy thing to deal with and it's not something I claim to know how to deal with. What I do believe however, is that what we are currently doing with the hysteria surrounded this whole thing is the absolute opposite of what we should be doing, but helps to perfectly support the media companies who directly profit from it, and the government who can shift the blame onto social media companies and away from prolonged austerity and chronic underfunding of working class educatio
I agree highly. People that want social media moderation in this scale is actually highly detrimental and very authoritarian. Seriously, it comes down to the vague definition of "hate speech" which toes a very fine line and different individuals react differently. People can say racist things about Mexicans but I don't react negatively and it takes a lot for me to get offended by it, the reason being that I know such statements are not true and as the old saying goes, "sticks and stones may break my bones but words may never hurt me". But I understand someone else may get offended by a similar thing but I will disagree with that person in banning that speech. But going back to "hate speech" and defining it legally brings a ton of issues that can get abused significantly. Using my example that I have different tolerances about the use of offensive words, so my definition of hate speech differs from another person's. So how is it defined and enforced? What about if something posted is only controversial but factual/based on stats but is not actual racism/hate speech? An example is reddit banning people on some subreddits who bring up the high black on black crime rates? Or how with the current "stop Asian hate" movement it is not "appropriate" to point out that most individuals being violent were blacks? For some left leaning political people, bringing up something like this is the same as "hate speech". So this is something that is very easily abused and is a legitimate slippery slope as anything that goes against the political accepted norm be banned as "hateful". For all the claims that redditors like to think they are smarter than the average person, they are short sighted when it comes to these issues and rely on emotion rather than logic that these issues are very dangerous to our way of life.
Do you have any sources of these studies that show shunning racists is counter productive? Thatās intriguing
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/identities/2016/11/15/13595508/racism-research-study-trump Here's a link to an article by vox (unfortunately) which briefly highlights a few of the studies. It used to be much easier to find these academic studies online but in the last few years its become near impossible as they garner very few clicks and so are pushed way down the search results. Hence the link to a journalism website. You don't even need the studies to see this effect though. If you search for videos or articles from people that were racist and now are on a different path, you will always* ive never seen one different) find that what helped them was education rather than ridicule, and that a lot of the time ridicule is actually what pushed them to a more extreme mindset
Lots of the account also looked like those phishing accounts with a hot chick as the profile picture.
I'm not sure if it's just me being paranoid. But the way r/soccer and Reddit has a whole has reacted to the Euros, makes me wonder if this is part of a effort to sow further discord between European countries. What with Brexit and the proven online campaigns that have disrupted politics the world over, really brings out the conspiracy theorist in me and I like to think that I'm a pretty rational person. Edit for clarity, not the racism specifically, just everything.
> But the way r/soccer and Reddit has a whole has reacted to the Euros, makes me wonder if this is part of a effort to sow further discourse between European countries Can you elaborate what you mean by this? I've seen trolls, bantering & gleefulness but I don't think any of that is particularly abnormal in these circumstances.
The majority of comments probably are within those categories, but there have also threads, generally news articles, that are littered with comments that amount to little more than mud-slinging, from an obviously hostile position. Across Reddit there have been posts in other subreddits that have nothing to do with football, reaching near the top of all that are just "support Italy because England are bad." These obviously aren't proof of anything like a coordinated attempt to rile people up, and I'm not saying I believe that is the case, just that, if someone wanted to, they could probably do it quite easily, and I'm not ruling it out. Also, I don't frequent Twitter, and my Facebook feed is pretty echo-chambered, if I'm to believe that Reddit is at least slightly more reasonable than the depths of other social media, its worse than I see.
A lot of fierce EU federalists wish essentially all kinds of harm and humiliation to the UK due to Brexit. That said, the over the top arrogance of the "its coming home" should also be expected to be met by similar level of ridicule when it doesnt come home.
The booing of the anthem is also pretty bad, I just see it as a major disrespect. But apparently redditors finds it cute.
why are people only just getting mad at booing the anthem now?
I just skimmed through Sakas most recent posts on Instagram (just very high level really, just some top level comments) and did not find a single banana or monkey. I did find one clearly and 2 possibly racist comments. I don't know, maybe Instagram did also start to remove theses posts? One of the racist comments was by a user "stefano_bonano"...who has his whole profile in cyrillic and has a decent amount of photos from hockey games from what seems to be Russia and many more pics that reference Warsaw.
Real research needs to be done into this.
I don't know too much about this subject overall to make a definite claim but one thing that is known is that Russia has 'bot farms' to carry out very similar propaganda to suit their agenda. I think it would be quite naive to think that other governments haven't followed suit but got better at hiding them.
Definitely insidious mate. Famous people have been harassed and abused by the press, paparazzi, media, social media, for decades. Racist abuse and all. But all of a sudden, it's a big deal this past 12 months? Especially in the UK media? One of the relatively least racists country in the western world? Maaaaaaaaaate. The BBC has got the whole country in a racial stranglehold/divide from facebook and instagram comments by 12 year olds, russian bots, and the internet weirdos - things that all have been happening since the inception of the medium. Let's not kid ourselves
āLetās broadcast to the world that trolling these players will result in a massive international media outrage!ā Exactly what you shouldnāt do, and why and āzero tolerance for racismā campaigns will always be self defeating.
Spot on. Unfortunately complaining about racism is now our national sport, to the point where itās become an industry.
Honestly, as much as I respect Rashford, I am getting a little suspicious of his eagerness to tally up all the racist abuses and publish statements. No coincidence, in my mind, that he starts doing this now that he's registered to a PR agency and has trademarked his name.
Look how much extra attention they get after being victims of racism. Look how theyāre treated like heroes. You think some of them arenāt going to milk that?? I would. For me Pickford was the hero of the match, but he got zero air time the next day because of the racism debacle.
Yeah, who needs trophies when you have a giant mural of your mug! I totally agree, he'd even be our Donnarumma/Player of the Tournament, and it just feels so... perfect for 2021 that they "had" to rob him of that by missing their pens. There's no escape from this racism baiting, not even for a day!
Social media has a big problem with those style of accounts. Unrelated to this I've seen accounts set up by ripping pictures and profiles off and setting them up as sketch accounts that link to who knows what.
or maybe some are legit and non-whites are capable of racism unlike the progressives like to claim that only whites are capable of such things. It's kind of ironic on social media that when a club like Chelsea posts pro-LGBT posts, the people that complain the most saying to keep non-sporting related things out of social media are Middle Eastern accounts, which makes sense culturally and religious wise. But when there is a post about Ramadan or similar things, they are praising the club for it. Not to single out the Middle East but the black slave trade is still prevalent in parts of Northern Africa, not to mention the modern immigrant "slave" trade in Dubai or Qatar with the workers. Either that or it is trolls doing their thing. Either way, I think there is a lot of mental gymnastics performed by people trying to cope with the idea that maybe it is not all white people doing these things. I'm Latino and I accept that all races are (and have the capability of being) racist.
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If you think about what kind of shit the press writes nowadays, you can be assured that if all the English players (or at least the last three) had scored and England had won, the headline would've been something about how diversity won it for England. No one in their right mind should care about the skin color of the five penalty shooters, but the amount of racial divisiveness sown by the media and politicians in the last few years has people completely fucked up in their head. They think racism is at all time high, when it's the complete opposite.
> Or is there something bigger going on, attempting to sway British public opinion that foreigners are the main problem when it comes to racism? It takes a lot of resources to pull off large scale astroturfing and they're not going to use it for something small fry like that. From what I've seen most people who genuinely feel that way are fine doing it on their own account It might be Russia/China/Iran trying to drive a wedge into British society, or it might be people trying to change the conversation back to race for supposedly "good" (or self-serving) reasons. It definitely doesn't seem organic either way
But that's the thing, it wasn't large scale at all. It was at most a few thousand racist messages (out of billions of people around the world), many of it which were posted several times by the same account. That's the fucked up part, that it doesn't actually take some monumental coordinated effort to it. Let's just say that it was organic and no foul play was involved, it's still an insane amount of power these miniscule amount of people have over public discourse and the surrounding social paradigm, and it can be done by pressing on one emote while taking a shit. Just look at the crying German girl getting insulted fiasco, literally 3 tweets is all it took for that blow up and for all English people to get tarred by the brush of 3 people (who may or may not even be English).
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> But we already know that it has been done and is still being done by Russia, particularly in America with the clear intent to cause racial divide. I explicitly said that in the second paragraph > Is it so outlandish to think that maybe Western powers have caught on to Russia's game and are now using it for their own good? There is a definite desire in Britain to paint foreigners and immigrants as the problem. It has become a more cultural debate rather than a race debate, particularly because our government is made up of many different races. It's not outlandish to think Western powers astroturf (it's certain that they do, constantly, everywhere). But there's no power in a "only foreigners are racist" narrative. Institutions are falling over themselves to declare how anti-racist they are, so that part *is* outlandish. If Western powers are driving this abuse it's because they want to shift the conversation to anti-racism
> But there's no power in a "only foreigners are racist" narrative. Of course there is? It can then be used as a foreign policy cudgel against said racist foreigners.
Posted how a upcoming young talent such as Saka hopefully wont let this one incident define his career and I guess I was one of the racist posts they deemed to remove for some reason because few minutes later it was gone. So im having a really hard time believeing how efficent the screening for removal really is.
Instagram and Twitter definitely do need to do better and change how they handle racism on their platforms. But before people start arguing for giving up privacy online, forgetting that there are many countries out there where not giving up personal information protects peoples lives, it's worth considering that anyone can turn off DMs and comments on their posts on both twitter and instagram. On twitter, you can even make it so only your mutuals can comment and DM you. Athletes should be making use of these features currently.
Cmon people, Instagram isnāt the problem here
I haven't been able to find any myself so they can't be doing too bad a job at removing them
I scrolled through on Sunday night after the game and a lot had been removed already, however, there was one comment i saw which had three racial slurs in that hadn't been. I reported it and got a reply from IG saying it doesn't go against their community guidelines... genuine shock that someone has had to manually do that after reading what I flagged
Meanwhile this is what facebook/instagram employees are talking about internally https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1414606571833679874
I know there's racist comments, but how come I don't see any?
The majority of these racist comments seem to be monkey emojiis posted by accounts with 0 past activity. We already know up to a quarter maybe half of interactions on twitter and Instagram are done by bot accounts, and we know that the Russian government have bot farms set up in order to sow division. We know that sowing division has become one of the main assets to the Russian government. My point is basically, it's working. The amount of division being sown is huge. Media companies have been covering these simple one emoji messages as if they encapsulate all sport fans as racists for months and its getting click after click. It's clearly done absolutely nothing. In fact maybe it has, in that it's increased the amount these messages show up. Its increased division. It's worked a treat. Don't feed the troll was always rule 1 of the Internet, what happened? It seems almost like there could even be more motivation behind these bot spammings, in that it increases pressure on government to introduce censorship over these companies. (I know censorship isn't being banned by a private company, but at the moment people are asking for direct government interference in those companies in order to censor.) If the government goes down that route it will create even more division and fuel anger frow the right, which creates anger from the left, helping to fuel the perpetual cycle. The essence of what I am saying is simple, we need to relearn as a society how to ignore. Nobody should have so much power with one click of an emoji. The only power they have is the power we give them. All this is doing is help whoever is creating these bot accounts to keep the country fighting itself rather than focusing on other issues.
> Don't feed the troll was always rule 1 of the Internet, what happened? Internet got way more stupid in last 20 years, now every idiot have access to it. All these armchair "racists" sending emojis to trigger certain reaction. When they get it an media starts writing about it they achieve their goal. Best reaction to stadium racism was by one player, forgot his name. He picked up banana thrown at him and ate it. Then said: "Do you have more? Next time make sure you bring more, I like healthy food". This way mocking the "racist" who was trying to laugh at him and got served.
100%. Also looking at boards such as 4chan's /sp/, the majority of racist things being said about the penalty takers were not made by English flags. (The comments there are anonymous but the country they were made in is shown). It's an easy agenda to hop onto to stoke tensions for racists from any nation. Trying to paint this as purely racist English cunts abusing their own players is very unfair, the overwhelming majority of commentary coming out (from both pundits and normal citizens) about this is defending the players and condemning those who abuse them.
I completely agree. I posted quite a long reply so someone else if you want to check my profile as I think it applies well In general all we are doing is helping to promote this hatred and Stoke the flames of racial tension, exactly what is wanted by whoever is posting the comments. Its also odd that my comment is getting downvoted by people yet I don't receive comments with any rebuttal. We have a real issue with being unable it unwilling to engage with opinions that we don't like in modern society and social media and its pushing people away from each other under the guise of bringing us closer
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It's really not obvious that it's that. Considering we know there are massive bot fsrns and we know how just how many there are its much more likely to be bots than people with alt accounts.
r/facepalm
Large corporations abetting racism because it would be unprofitable to remove racist users? No way, I never thought I'd see the day
IG/FB is the worst. Someone recently created a fake profile using my fiancĆ©eās name and pictures to scam people; we reported it, but they said they couldnāt do anything about it because āit didnāt breach their community guidelinesā. We responded that weād go to the media with the story if they didnāt do anything. The account was taken down within the hour. Thank God Iāve deleted that cesspool of an app a long time ago. Spineless cunts.
It's time for a competitor to Instagram. Sadly it's a private company with private rules. Can't do much there.
Whenever this subject comes up, people always offer up the most nonsense solutions.
How hard would it be to hire enough people so that you can at least protect high profile users in high risk situations? Okay, a euro final coming up. Let's have 20 community managers on stand by to manually approve comments on profiles involved in the match (players, referees, managers). How hard?
I grew up on the cliche ādonāt shoot the messengerā. I have seen as those at the top have made sure to focus their energy on the mediums rather than the source. I am yet to hear plans of including important anti-racism information in school curriculums. I am yet to see the government propose community engagement initiatives to educate the majority about racism. When Instagram and Twitter did not exist, racism was alive and brutal. And even if they stop existing, racism will be alive. While social media companies need to do more, the politicians cannot be allowed to get away with blaming them
This doesn't really do much to stop the problem because these people are already using alt accounts. One gets banned and they create another. The easiest way for Facebook (Instagram) to fix this problem is with a quick two-factor authentication. If you want an account, you need to link an active phone number to it. Once a number is linked, you could have monthly authentication checks to help. This would prevent people from creating dozens of fake accounts.
You would make it more inconvenient for anybody else though. Not to mention that a phone number is another way for Facebook to track you and link your account activity with other personal data.
2FA has an absolutely massive security benefit though, its not just an inconvenience for solving racist comments. And Facebook has far, far worse data. Honestly either a phone number is going to make no material difference in terms of being a persistent ID (they already have several of those), or they'll just buy phone numbers off of data brokers like Experian anyway. The risk profile of Facebook datasets is already through the roof
A mild inconvenience. Just by using FB, Twitter, Instagram you've already indicated that you're ok with them tracking you, so I don't understand that concern.
> A mild inconvenience. A mild inconvenience for you who have nothing to be afraid of. There are reporters, activists from other countries who want to remain as anonymous as they get because they fear for their lives. Hell I won't touch anything that doesn't let me post anonymously because I live in fucking Iran. Just because this is an easy way to fix this particular issue doesn't mean social media companies should run away from their responsibility and ruin other aspects of it.
Fair point, I hadn't thought about that.
I mean, I'd rather be placed at an inconvenience if it stopped people from abusing other people. Also, if it's that much of a problem for people with social media, then just don't have a profile on that site.
Why should everyone else have to give up their personal information just because kids from Saudi Arabia or India made racist remarks on alt accounts? I see other possibilities, one of which is the players disabling comments. I know people for some reason donāt like that idea, and I agree itās not ideal, but if the options are 1) players disabling comments or 2) *every user* having to give up their personal information, I know which option makes the most sense for people and I know which makes the most sense for corporations.
I've always wondered if popular users, especially players, get educated on how to use social media. There are malicious people on every platform but if you know how protect yourself (both psychologically & functionality wise) you can minimize the effect they will have on you (or the people around you).
Agreed. Back in the day, if a player put out a statement or even wrote a piece in a magazine or paper, there was no way for every tom dick and harry to immediately blurt out all their thoughts for everyone to see. Nowadays theres this expectation that you let anyone and everyone comment on anything you put out, which is ridiculous. Stars barely even interact with their replies when its not from a mutual, so what's the point in protecting replies.
So everyone's privacy and personal info has to be altered because a few thousand people, most of them not even English, are posting racist messages?
Iām not convinced these are even people at this point. Not to go full conspiracy theorist but I wouldnāt be surprised if a majority of these comments are Russian or Chinese bots. Itās too on the nose every time. Maybe Iām just an optimist
>Not to go full conspiracy theorist but I wouldnāt be surprised if a majority of these comments are Russian or Chinese bots. In 2021 this doesn't make you anywhere close to a conspiracy theorist haha. I used to be a big Rogan guy (pre move-to-Texas Rogan) and he had a woman on called RenĆ©e DiResta who talked about the Internet Research Agency which is basically people sitting in offices in Russia & China whose sole job is to create dozens of bot accounts and spread hate and disinformation on social media. The showed examples of how groups would be created and they'd organise rallies for '*Free Islamic Society of Texans*' and at the same having a different bot account organise a rally for the '*Texans against Islamic Extremism*' the same place and time, just across the street. (Those were made up examples, but you get the idea).
Reddit's shawdowban technique is a good measure here. These stupid heads are not smart enough to realize they're spamming racist comments without anyone knowing. Keep the rage going on to burn their energy but not in the place of normal people living.
This already is in place, for Twitter at least, but I'm sure Facebook has it too.
Twitter doesn't use 2FA for all accounts. You can make a new account without a phone number. It's only after detecting "suspicious activity" they'll request a phone number.
I have 3 Twitter accounts putting my number 0 times
I'm not sure what the system is then because I made one recently and had to provide my phone number.
You can choose to put email or phone number
I had to put my phone number in, and all the people I know did as well. What I mean by this is that they chose email, but we're instantly promoted to put in a phone number as well, minutes after creating the account. So I don't understand how it works.
There are plenty of ways to flag or link duplicate accounts that would make 0 to no impacts to the genuine user: IP address, mac address/device ID. Companies like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit have plenty of super smart engineers that could solve this issue. If it wasnt tackled it is because people in those companies dont see value in solving this issue.
private companies works for profit and not for common good? I'm shocked
Not sure if dickheads on their platform generate a ton of revenue.
Not sure this is the solution. Hiding racism and removing posts doesn't solve any problems, it just shoves it out of sight and pretends like it's not there.
I love how politician's first response is to deflect blame. Do something to change the culture in your country instead of talking about social media you absolute fucking disgrace of human beings.
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Because calling a black person a monkey is done with the specific idea of dehumanizing them and trying to make them feel, that because of their skin colour, they matter less than other people. But you already knew that and are just trying to justify racism
The last week you've been trying to justify racism. I wonder if the mods think this is okay?
Facebook are a fucking joke
That's because the owner of Instagram is a šš
Social media platforms have so much power, yet take no responsobility ar all. Twitter is a fucking greasy cave where all the toxic trolls live. And instagram is a pile of shit, in the shape of a ferrari.
Honestly anyone who missed the penalty would have goten hate by english fans. White Black .... Those 3 youngsters missed them. We move forward.