In a report released yesterday, it is revealed that the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ quarterfinal between England and France led to the largest spike of abuse during the tournament.
FIFA released the report on the United Nations International Day for Countering Hate Speech on June 18th.
According to the report, 38 percent of identifiable abuse came from accounts based in Europe, with 36 percent from South America.
The Social Media Protection Service scanned over 20 million posts and comments on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube throughout the tournament and, following specialist artificial intelligence (AI) flagging of abusive comments, strengthened by two layers of human analysis, 19,636 posts/comments were confirmed by the service provider as abusive, discriminatory, or threatening.
These posts/comments were reported directly to the relevant social media platform(s) for breaking their community guidelines. In many cases, the offending posts were removed by the social platform in question as a direct result of being reported by FIFA.
Additionally, participating teams and players at the tournament were offered access to moderation software that would instantly and automatically hide offensive comments (including spam) from their pages, with a total of 286,895 comments hidden from public view before the targeted recipient or their followers had to see their contents.
More than 300 individuals who made abusive, discriminatory, or threatening posts/comments during the tournament have been verifiably identified and this information will be shared with the relevant member associations and jurisdictional law authorities to facilitate real-world action being taken against offenders.
The FIFA Women’s World Cup Australia & New Zealand 2023™, which begins in just over a month’s time, will also feature SMPS support, with several participating teams having already agreed to implement the moderation element of the service to immediately and automatically limit visibility of online abuse.
In addition, FIFA continues to engage with social media platforms to encourage them to take more action against those who send abusive, discriminatory, and threatening messages to teams and players participating in its tournaments and will continue to share information about offenders with member associations and jurisdictional law authorities to support potential real-world action being taken against them.
FIFA also provides a confidential, dedicated, highly secure and web-based whistleblowing system so that individuals can report abuse.
Users can attach supporting documentation and create an anonymous postbox that allows them to correspond with FIFA without submitting personal information. FIFA takes a zero-tolerance approach to all forms of abuse in football, and all issues raised will be handled in line with our statutory rules, codes of conduct and internal guidelines.
(Picture: The Telegraph)