Twitter has revealed that the UK was “by fair” the main location for racist posts targeted at England players after the Euro 2020 final at Wembley.
England’s positive European Championship campaign came to an end in a penalty shoot-out defeat as Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka failed to score from the spot.
The three players received horrendous online abuse at the conclusion of the tournament as police confirmed that 11 arrests had been made last week while they continue to investigate the racial abuse aimed at England players.
Twitter’s UK account revealed on the social media platform some alarming figures around last months’ final.
“Today, We want to share an overview of our analysis of the abhorrent racist abuse directed at England players during the Euro 2020 Final last month, and an update of the ongoing steps we’ve put in place since February to protect the public conversation in the UK.
“On the night of the Euros Final, our automated tools kicked in immediately, and ensured we identified and removed 1622 abusive Tweets in the 24 hours that followed. Only 2% of the Tweets we removed generated more than 1000 Impressions.
“While many have quite rightly highlighted the global nature of the conversation, it is also important to acknowledge the UK was – by far – the largest country of origin for the abusive Tweets we removed.
“Our data suggests that ID verification would have been unlikely to prevent the abuse from happening – as of the permanently suspended accounts, 99% of account owners were identifiable.
“Since our update in February, we’ve improved our proactive tools to identify racist abuse and removed just under 13,000 Tweets – of which 95% were identified proactively. Soon, we will be testing a new product feature that temporarily autoblocks accounts using harmful language.
“There is no place for racist abuse on Twitter. Our aim is always that Twitter be used as a vehicle for every person to communicate safely. We’re determined to do all we can, along with our partners, to stop these abhorrent views and behaviours being seen on and off the platform.”