Twitter claims that identity verification would not have prevented the torrent of racist abuse against black players on the England soccer team, which followed the team's defeat in the Euro 2020 championship game last month. According to a update posted by Twitter UK Today, most of the accounts suspended for abusive content during the tournament were not anonymous.
โOf the permanently suspended Tournament accounts, 99 percent of the account owners were identifiable,โ Twitter said. The company also said that while the racist tweets come from all over the world, the majority originated in the UK.
Our data suggest that it is unlikely that identity verification would have prevented the abuse from occurring; from the permanently suspended accounts, 99% of the account owners were identifiable.
- Twitter UK (@TwitterUK) August 10, 2021
According to Twitter, its automated tools identified and deleted 1,622 racist tweets during the match and in the 24 hours afterwards. Of the deleted tweets, only 2 percent were viewed more than 1,000 times, Twitter says.
Twitter has had a long-standing problem with abuse on the platform. Following a boycott in 2017CEO Jack Dorsey promised that Twitter would take a "more aggressive stance" in enforcing its rules. Since then, the company has implemented more granular features in an attempt to curb abuse, such as allowing people to hide answers or limit who can reply to your tweets.
Twitter continues to work on ways to prevent abusive tweets from being sent, including implementing reply messages who ask people if they are safe from using potentially harmful language. Twitter is also developing a feature which "automatically temporarily blocks accounts that use malicious language so that they cannot interact with your account."
