‘Crawl back under your rock’, Boris Johnson tells racist abusers of England players
Boris Johnson on Monday told social media users behind a torrent of racist messages to England's defeated footballers to "crawl back under the rock from which you emerged" as MPs called for tougher curbs on tech giants.
The Prime Minister was joined by the Duke of Cambridge in condemning "sickening" racism towards England players after their Euro 2020 final loss to Italy on penalties, while campaigners accused social media giants of failing to block abusive messages.
Scotland Yard launched an investigation after racist posts were sent to Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho, each of whom missed shoot-out penalties at Wembley, while a mural of Rashford in Manchester was defaced within an hour of the final whistle.
An estate agent and a comedian who has appeared on the BBC were among those linked to racist messages on Monday, while thousands more were posted from anonymous accounts hosted on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The England manager, Gareth Southgate, said the abuse players had received was "unforgiveable". In a tweet, captain Harry Kane wrote: "Three lads who were brilliant all summer had the courage to step up and take a pen when the stakes were high.
"They deserve support and backing, not the vile racist abuse they've had since last night. If you abuse anyone on social media, you're not an England fan and we don't want you."
Speaking at a Downing Street press conference, Mr Johnson said: "To those who have been directing racist abuse at some of the players, I say shame on you and I hope you crawl back under the rock from which you emerged."
Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, added that the "toughest possible sanctions" need to be introduced to combat abuse on social media platforms and pointed to the Government's Online Harms Bill, which will fine companies 10 per cent of their turnover if they fail to take down harmful content.
On Monday night Tyrone Mings, an England player, dismissed Ms Patel's condemnation of the abuse footballers had faced.
"You don't get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as 'gesture politics' and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we're campaigning against happens," he wrote on Twitter.
A spokesman for Ms Patel declined to comment on the tweet.
Campaigners and senior Tories warned that the Bill, which has been published in draft form but is yet to begin its passage through Parliament, did not go far enough to require companies to block abuse from being posted in the first place.
Julian Knight, the chairman of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee, accused the Government of "dragging its feet" and claimed ministers wanted the issue of online regulation to be "kicked into the long grass".
"I am very concerned that the Online Safety Bill will mean that we could still see situations like this occur, and frankly it's unacceptable," he told The Telegraph.
The Telegraph understands that Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary, is planning to intervene to make police forces and social media companies take racism directed at footballers more seriously.
Mr Dowden will work with the FA and the Premier League to make sure reports of abuse are followed up with police and the platforms on which abuse is posted.
"We want to look at some of the issues around reporting," a source said. "Clubs say they report it but there seems to be a disconnect between widespread incidents of it happening and the consequences for the people doing it. The Secretary of State is pretty frustrated that we keep going around this loop and we aren't seeing any movement."
The source said ministers want to see "real world consequences" for people who send racist abuse.
Sanjay Bhandari, who chairs the Kick It Out campaign, said social media companies had the tools to prevent racist abuse being seen by other users but were failing to deploy them.
"It's actually completely in their sweet spot to understand that a monkey emoji sent to a footballer is prima facie likely to be racist and so prima facie should be deleted and not be up on the platform in the first place," Mr Bhandari told the BBC.
"The reality is they simply haven't invested enough time and money in that kind of technology because there's no money in it – but they have invested time and money in similar technology to prevent copyright infringement."
A government source said social media companies have been urged to develop technological solutions to filtering out racist abuse rather than pursuing a "whack-a-mole" strategy, but added that it was "not going to work" for all posts to be reviewed before they are visible to other users.
Twitter said it had proactively removed more than 1,000 posts which violated its policy over the past 24 hours, and had also taken swift action to permanently suspend a number of accounts.
However, thousands of messages posted on social media platforms were allowed to remain visible for hours after the final whistle. Staff at Facebook were said to be raising concerns with management, with one writing on a staff forum that the abuse was "entirely preventable" and others complaining that comments had been flagged for more than 12 hours.
Meanwhile, the estate agent Savills on Monday suspended one of its employees over a tweet he allegedly shared on his personal account racially abusing members of the England team.
Andrew Bone, a commercial buildings manager from Sale, denied the accusations, saying his account was "taken over by a third party". The estate agent said the matter had been passed to Greater Manchester Police (GMP) to investigate.
A comedian who previously appeared on the BBC had a series of shows cancelled after he tweeted that "black guys are bad at penalties".
"All I'm saying is, the white guys scored," Andrew Lawrence tweeted shortly after Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho had missed. He later doubled down on his comments, retweeting his post and writing: "I can see that this has offended a lot of people, and I'm sorry that black guys are bad at penalties."
In response, at least five venues cancelled his forthcoming shows or stopped selling tickets. His agent told the British Comedy Guide he longer represented the comedian and declined to comment further.
In Worcester, a father of two was facing accusations of racism towards players after England's loss. Nick Scott, 50, denied tweeting racist comments calling for Rashford to "burn his MBE" just minutes after the 23-year-old Manchester United striker missed from the spot in the shoot-out.
Mr Scott later denied sending the tweet, claiming his Twitter account – with the handle Scottywwfc – had been hacked. He told his local newspaper: "I am getting loads of grief over this. I was hacked. I would never write anything like that."
Leyton Orient FC banned a fan for three years after being alerted to racist posts on Twitter.
Many of the messages were posted to the Instagram page of Saka, who missed the crucial penalty in England's defeat, with racist comments including monkey, gorilla and banana emojis.
The Telegraph investigated some of the most prominent comments and users on the page and discovered that many were posted from accounts without a profile picture and names made up of random letters and numbers. Other users posting racist comments had no posts on their own accounts and were set to private.
One user, with Turkish and Bosnia-Herzegovinan flags in their profile, posted monkey emojis, while another from an account by a user who used their full name and described themselves as a "teaching assistant" posted a string of orangutan emojis. The Telegraph discovered the user was based in Syria.
A spokesman for Facebook said it had "quickly removed comments and accounts directing abuse at England's footballers" from its Instagram platform and that players should initiate a tool called Hidden Words to hide such abuse from their comments or direct messages.
"No-one should have to experience racist abuse anywhere, and we don't want it on Instagram," a Facebook company spokesman said.