‘Time for big tech to get tough against online abuse’

VICTIM: Rugby referee Wayne Barnes describing his experience on stage at SportAccord

Chewing the Fat, out to lunch with Phil Ascough

Fight against racism on the agenda at global sports event

York City away, early 1980s. The Tigers were defending a corner at the away end. It was open, pretty packed and tight to the touchline, making it easy for a person nearer the front to reach up and lob a banana into the penalty area.

The target, York’s big, black, brilliant striker Keith Walwyn, ignored it. Hull City legend Peter Skipper didn’t attempt to hide his mirth has he picked it up and tossed into touch.

Justice would have been for Walwyn to win the ball, fire it goalwards and then celebrate as a fruit-assisted deflection wrong-footed the keeper. Literally beaten by a banana shot.

But why was it there in the first place? Later that decade Manchester City fans launched their craze of carting inflatable bananas to every match. That was harmless fun, but what happened at York can only have been down to dim-witted racism, and premeditated as well. Bananas have never been the half-time snack of choice. He took it to chuck it.

Fast forward 40 years and the racists have “progressed” from bunging bananas to abusing on social media. Hull City manager Liam Rosenior is one of the latest victims of a wave which is being met by calls for action by the tech giants who operate the platforms.

SportAccord World Sport & Business Summit highlighted the issues when industry leaders met in Birmingham the week after the attack on City’s boss.

Wayne Barnes, who refereed last year’s Rugby World Cup final, told how he and his wife received threats against them and their children.

Janie Frampton OBE, vice president of the International Federation of Sports Officials, called for points to be docked from football cubs which are felt to be failing.

Sarah Gregorius, director of global policy & strategic relations, women’s football, at FIFPRO – the international players’ union – thinks a shake-up at the top of sport is long overdue.

Sanjay Bhandari, chair of Kick It Out, formed in 1993 as Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football, called for a united approach within sport to deal with the problems.

Jonathan Hirshler, CEO of Signify, outlined the work of his business in tracking down culprits. Panellists supported the efforts being made to ensure offenders are called to account.

SportAccord is little-known but hugely influential. After a five-year break since the last session in Gold Coast – a hiatus enforced by global catastrophes – it resumed at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham.

WANTS CAMPAIGN: Kick It Out chair Sanjay Bhandari. Picture credit: Kick It Out

Briefly, SportAccord brings together the top people in world sport, as well as an array of acronyms. There’s ASOIF, which comprises the federations for all the sports that make it into the summer Olympic programme. WOF is the winter Games counterpart. ARISF is for those activities recognised as sports and with ambitions to climb the ladder.

There are others, and they work with all sorts of sports which have to try a little harder than football, rugby, cricket and so on to gain acceptance. If you think it’s stretching things to welcome cheerleading and underwater hockey into the Olympics, remember that sport climbing made it.

SportAccord is where much of the lobbying takes place by the sports and the venues. Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, was there. So was the Saudi Arabia Sports Minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki Al Saud. Don’t ask me which of them had the biggest entourage.

Bach’s team was planning for Paris this summer, LA in 2028, Gold Coast in 2032 and the various winter Games and age group competitions. Someone offered me an interview with the Prince and failed to deliver, but there’s no doubt he was working on the next big event to take to Saudi.

Around the edges you get the consultants who help to provide the money to pay for the major sporting events, the infrastructure to make sure they run smoothly, the marketing to build audiences, and the measures to protect sport against drugs, match-fixing, online abuse. And there’s plenty of media. I was at my ninth SportAccord, part of a team which produces a daily newspaper to capture all the conference highlights.

Barnes kicked off the discussion during a preliminary interview in which he welcomed the conviction in Australia earlier in the week for online abuse against a match official during last year’s Rugby World Cup.

“I will make mistakes as a match official just the same as a player or coach will make mistakes,” he said.

“But to go to the next level of abusing the family of the match official, I struggle to get my head around that.”

Barnes revealed that Signify had researched how many abusive messages were sent to teams, coaches and match officials during a tournament which should have been the pinnacle of his career.

“By a considerable distance I was the most abused official,” said Barnes.

“It comes with the territory a bit. If you referee a final it’s the biggest game and it was a one-score game but to us it’s a stark reminder of what officials put themselves through.

“The bit that sticks in the craw is that people who think they can criticise or abuse me then take a step further and start to criticise my family, my wife in particular, who is in sports marketing. People think they can send direct messages not just disagreeing with my decision but also threats of violence against my children”.

Frampton, a former international football referee, was perhaps simplifying practicalities with her call for points to be docked, but not many people have experienced what she went through.

“I was refereeing a league game and the fact that I was a woman meant I didn’t have to do anything else – that’s what annoyed people,” she said.

“A guy leaned over one of the hoardings and shouted that he hoped my children died of cancer.”

The attack on Frampton and the incident at York City are less likely to happen now because of the crackdown in and around match venues. Bhandari made the point that a fan might spout all sorts of racist comments in the pub but will tone down his behaviour on the way to the match as he encounters more people, stewards, police and cameras. But social media offers anonymity and the Online Safety Act – approved last September but yet to take effect – only goes so far with its pledge that social media platforms “will be expected to” remove illegal content. Bhandari wants a campaign.

“We are a tiny industry in comparison to the problem we are dealing with,” he said.

“The top five companies in the world are all tech companies. They dwarf you and they don’t care but our intangible power is huge and it’s how we use that to rally and campaign and influence user behaviour.”

Online abuse matters hugely to an industry which is placing digital media at the heart of its strategy for engaging with younger audiences. In another panel, a vice president of Superbowl champions the Kansas City Chiefs, said the relationship between Taylor Swift and one of their players Travis Kelce sent their media profile “to the moon”. But safety is paramount.

Hirshler revealed that his company’s research among teams in America’s National Basketball Association identified high levels of homophobic abuse.

“The players said they had been telling people that for a while,” he said.

In grand slam tennis the abuse is most prevalent among gamblers whose bets have gone down and who then accuse players of throwing the game. Support from governing bodies is mixed. Hirshler says World Rugby is exemplary but others are hiding.

“We speak to clubs but no one seems to have responsibility,” he said.

“We get referred to the comms lead, security, safeguarding, media and we still haven’t come across one person who has responsibility at board level.”

Gregorius responded: “Sport reacts to two things – crisis and money. This is a crisis for the athletes and the officials and the fans but it’s not a crisis for the right people. If I look at the people who sit in governance they are older, white, straight men.

TARGET: Hull City manager Liam Rosenior. Picture credit: Hull City

“They are not people who have experience of what it’s like to be in the margins. If you are someone who has existed in the margins this is an issue for you but it’s because of the lack of diversity in sports governance. They don’t see it so it’s not a crisis for them”.

Hirshler wants to partner with more sports federations so he can get more data, which is used to hold offenders to account and to influence education and support mental health provision.

Speaking afterwards, Bhandari told me about the holes he sees in the Government’s plans to act.

“Between 50 and 70 per cent of online abuse comes from overseas,” he said.

“The Online Safety Act sets criminal offences around rape and death threats but if the offender isn’t in the UK you can’t find and prosecute them.”

Even the barrage of abuse which followed the penalty misses by Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka at Euro 2020 was less than straightforward.

Bhandari said: “Boris Johnson promised banning orders and we welcomed that but we don’t know how it will deal with the wider problem. If 30 per cent of online abuse comes from the UK, how many of those people attend a match and would be impacted by a football banning order? Is it five per cent, ten per cent? Banning orders may be helpful but they are not a complete solution.

“We also need to get out of the mindset that this is just football. How much online abuse is bot-generated? How much is foreign states? Ransomware attacks? Political activists? Kids in their bedrooms trying to prove something? We have been asking Twitter and Facebook to give us the information for five years but they have never done that.

“Another challenge is who is going to investigate and prosecute? If you are in a big city like London or Manchester or Birmingham it’s possibly a priority but if you’re in the East Riding or Cornwall maybe not so much.

“The Government could put online hate crime into one dedicated unit to deal with it nationally. They would be able to create the policies more quickly. They tried it for the Euros and it worked well with a dozen or more prosecutions but then it was defunded.”

Both Barnes and Bhandari were aware of the Rosenior incident and we discussed it away from the panel session.

Barnes picked up on the issue of taking responsibility: “Sometimes governing bodies or clubs shy away from it because we don’t want to be the sport that’s associated with racist abuse or misogynistic abuse. We don’t want to be that sport. “

Bhandari revealed that he is part way through his tour of the 92 grounds in the Football League and Premier League and he hasn’t been to Hull yet. I’ve asked him to let us know when he comes here. Let’s show him that, whether Hull City is part of the problem or not, we can be a big part of the solution.