Tottenham are prepared to take firm decisions as their South Korean striker Son Heung-min faced racist insults on social media, following their 3-1 loss to Manchester United at home on Sunday.
“Another matchday and more abhorrent racial abuse suffered by one of our players. This has again been reported to the platforms and we shall now undertake a full review alongside the Premier League to determine the most effective action moving forward.”
a statement released by the club read.
The 28-year-old scored his side’s only goal at Old Trafford and was subjected to racism for his actions after Scott McTominay’s foul on his face, which left him on the pitch for a while.
Last week, several Premier League managers voiced their anger and called for a boycott of social media in retaliation to the frequent racist abuses received by the players. While a number of clubs, including Scottish champions Rangers, Championship sides Swansea City and Birmingham, have already boycotted their official social media channel for a week to combat the problem.
Swansea were the first to take this drastic decision and announced the boycott after Jamal Lowe, Ben Cabango and Yan Dhanda faced excessive racial abuses on social media in the last couple of months.
Shortly after Steven Gerrard’s Rangers followed suit, declaring that all their players and staff will be boycotting social media for a week in response to the negligible actions taken by the social media companies to tackle racism.
In the last week of March, Arsenal legend Thierry Henry decided to shut down all his social media pages due to the sheer proportion of racism and bullying he faced throughout the year.
However, both Twitter and Instagram have stated that they are working all year round to tackle the problem taking place in the first place.
“We are committed to Kick It Out’s initiative to tackle online hate, and look forward to continuing these discussions and developing solutions with our partners in football”.
Twitter said in a press release.
Facebook owned Instagram on the other hand, declared that they took action on 6.6 million cases of hate speech between October and December last year and are poised to “take tougher actions” against people breaking their law.
The Professional Footballers’ Association, has asked all the tech giants to prevent users from sending explicitly racist words, terms and emojis.
“While racist abuse is allowed to continue on each platform, we can only conclude that this is a choice by the companies running the social networks,”
it said.
The British government has also vowed to take strict measures, stating that the social media companies need to act fast and that racist messages would have to be removed “without any delay”.
Furthermore, if a company fails to meet their conditions, there could be serious criminal sanctions for senior executives along with the threat of massive fines of up to 10% of global turnover.
