LONDON: Facebook and Twitter said Monday they were scrambling to take down racially abusive comments directed at members of the England football team following a heartbreaking loss in Sunday鈥檚 Euro 2020 final.
The US social media giants said they were taking down racist and hateful content which had prompted condemnation from British political leaders.

On Monday, Twitter released a statement condemning the 鈥渁bhorrent racist abuse鈥� directed at the football players and said the attacks have 鈥渁bsolutely no place鈥� on its platform. 

The platform said it had removed thousands of tweets and suspended various accounts. 鈥淚n the past 24 hours, through a combination of machine learning based automation and human review, we have swiftly removed over 1000 Tweets and permanently suspended a number of accounts for violating our rules 鈥� the vast majority of which we detected ourselves proactively using technology,鈥� Twitter spokesperson announced.

The actions came after a stream of abusive messages on Twitter and Facebook-owned Instagram directed at Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka, the three players who missed England鈥檚 penalties on Sunday.
鈥淭he abhorrent racist abuse directed at England players last night has absolutely no place on Twitter,鈥� said a spokesperson for the San Francisco-based short messaging service.
鈥淚n the past 24 hours, through a combination of machine learning based automation and human review, we have swiftly removed over 1,000 Tweets and permanently suspended a number of accounts for violating our rules 鈥� the vast majority of which we detected ourselves proactively using technology. 鈥�
Facebook said earlier in a statement it had 鈥渜uickly removed comments and accounts directing abuse at England鈥檚 footballers last night and we鈥檒l continue to take action against those that break our rules.鈥�
鈥淣o one thing will fix this challenge overnight, but we鈥檙e committed to keeping our community safe from abuse,鈥� it said.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other leaders expressed dismay over the online abuse.
Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden tweeted, 鈥淚 share the anger at appalling racist abuse of our heroic players鈥� while warning online services.
鈥淪ocial media companies need to up their game in addressing it and, if they fail to, our new Online Safety Bill will hold them to account with fines of up to 10 percent of global revenue,鈥� he wrote.

(With AFP)