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August 11, 2021 - 11:46am
Last month, in the wake of the Euro 2020 final the three players who missed their penalties — Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jaydon Sancho, all young black men — were subjected to horrible racist abuse online.
One of the few mitigating factors there was that, according to Reuters, 70% of that abuse came from accounts registered overseas: that is, it wasn’t, mainly, British people being racist.
But now Twitter has published a blog post saying that “The UK was by far the largest country of origin for the abusive Tweets we removed on the night of the Final and in the days that followed.” So was that 70% claim wrong?
Well: possibly not. Imagine that 100 racist tweets were sent. (There were more than that, of course.) Now imagine that 70 of them were sent from 70 different countries: one from Afghanistan, one from Albania, one from Algeria, all the way down to Iraq. And then 30 of them were sent from the United Kingdom.
Now, 70% of racist tweets were sent from overseas: but the UK is by far, by a factor of 30, “the largest country of origin”. Given that Twitter didn’t say that the UK was the source of the majority of the abusive tweets (despite some bad reporting claiming otherwise), it seems likely that something like this is the case.
Perhaps a more interesting question, though, is: does this matter? Does it tell us anything? You can easily find hundreds of people saying that it shows that this is a racist country. But I think it tells us nothing at all: not that the UK is racist or that it isn’t. It is completely uninformative.
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SubscribeBut isn’t that UK life in general these days?
Anti-racist demand for racists has outstripped supply and they desperately need to conjure up more.
“Most people, on Twitter and elsewhere, are not dreadful”. While Twitter itself is dreadful
According to the BBC:
“Police have arrested 11 people as they continue a hate crimes investigation into social media messages sent after the Euro 2020 final.
The UK Football Policing Unit received 600 reports of racist comments sent to England’s black players after the defeat and judged 207 to be criminal.
Of these, 123 were posted by people overseas, while 34 came from the UK.”
Yep.
34.
Torrents of racial abuse on Twitter?
Meanwhile the “vile racist graffiti” on the Rashford mural proved to be nothing of the sort.
“Sticks and stones” was the rule when I was growing up.
“Honky” was the word for us white folk in the multi-cultural paradise of 1990s Canada. There was no real menace behind it, nor behind similar insults dished at minorities.
Maybe instead of handing even more licence to the censors, people should just learn to ignore the odd idiotic racial jibe from a tiny minority of tweeters.
There’s plenty of non-racist abuse on Twitter, which we accept as the price of a still-just-about-free society.
There’s another pretty obvious point to be made here.
Reuters said:
Whilst Twitter said (my emphasis):
We don’t know what proportion of the total online abuse was removed so these numbers could be wildly different from the start.
I am finally beginning to get what Twitter (and other social media) do. Each variety of social media is different but there are sets of mechanisms in common.
Let’s take one step back. Advertising (to sell products, or religion, or values, or anything at all, works by subliminally creating patterns of associations that have emotional force to individuals who want to participate in the message. It doesn’t affect people who are not ready to participate – there is a principle of tacit consent. Everyone has multiple, overlaid models of complex social learning they use to filter or allow through what they process. What advertising does, is it creates forms that hit enough triggers to cause an engagement with the message – potentially against the conscious wishes of the recipient. This is essentially a creative activity, and inherently bespoke in nature – a good advert is as good as a good piece of art. But this entire model is blown out of the water by a different approach.
Algorithmic technologies don’t need to go for this approach because they can scale in a way individual humans never can. A high speed, high volume scatter-gun generates a combinatoric volume of trigger possibilities that in effect relies on most of the flow to be filtered out at an individual level, but some combination or other of the message form will get through and cause engagement – and then other innate human mechanisms take over and you are hooked. For example, Tom Chivers claims “…10 racists could send a thousand racist tweets in an hour…”. But any coder worth the salt would find such an approach hopelessly inefficient – what do you think bots are for? If you can create code to make your racist (or anything else) tweets, why on earth would you need actual racists? You just want one or two racists to teach the code models what to do. This is what I mean by scale. And since algorithms are not human scale, they can replicate, magnify and transmit simultaneously to all corners at speeds that will overwhelm any bespoke human process.
The useful way to view Twitter is not as people. You are people. I am people. Twitter is a petri-dish of biological and social responses – a bunch of randomers you cannot look in the eye and you have no visibility of. Don’t get trapped, don’t engage with Twitter as just a user. Unless that is, you are doing so for very good reasons, like making money. Be the pusher, not the junkie. Learn to code.
people writing sanctimonious tweets about ‘anti racism’ do seem pretty dreadful
I wish Twitter would go the way of MySpace.
Both Chivers and Twitter should realize they have no easy way of knowing the country of origin of any Tweet given that if the sender uses VPN he/she can tweet from the UK but appear to be in the US or any European country.
As for the 3 players missing their penalty shots I personally blame the manager because he should have chosen his most experienced and seasoned players. The three chocked, and it was quite evident just looking at their faces just prior to them kicking the ball that they were chocking and were going to miss. Very disappointing really given that England always seems to chock on penalty shoot outs. On the other hand, England also played a lousy game because after the scored their first goal early on they just went on defense. There is no way one can maintain a one goal lead for close to 90 min by playing defense. One has to be on the offense and after all the best defense is offense. Not only that to adopt such a strategy one needs at least a 3 goal lead. Recall England have been up before by 2 to 0, and lost by doing exactly the same sort of stupid stuff. Quite frankly the England manager should be fired.
What? Sack Saint (Sir?) Gareth? Traitor!
Twitter needs to demand its users to provide their real identities and pay a subscription fee, only then will it stand a chance of cleaning up its platform and providing an opportunity for meaningful discussion.
I suppose I’m fortunate that I rarely look at Twitter. And I generally don’t come across racist comments or posts on Facebook. However, I come across racism every day in the comments below Daily Telegraph articles and occasionally, here (though less so, recently). I agree with Tom, most people are not dreadful.
But there are places where the dreadful ones tend to congregate and feel safe.
I am just glad we have diligent people like you monitoring such things so that we can be protected from such horrors. The more free thinking we tolerate the more wrong thinking we get.
Not monitoring – just observing.
MAGA, WWG1WGA,
“But there are places where the dreadful ones tend to congregate and feel safe.”
I do agree with the sentiment, but I think the dreadful ones are the BBC, Guardian, NYT, MSNBC, CNN, and those other monstrous Commie groups out to destroy all which is good and decent in the world.
Describing the BBC or Guardian as communist really diminishes the impact of your arguments. They’re not at all communist. It’s the equivalent of people on the left calling Republican or Tory Party fascists. If you can find an example of the BBC or Guardian or CNN calling for a proletarian revolution to overthrow capitalism I’ll concede the point.