ABSTRACT
For a while, those responsible for running football seemed confident that racism had been successfully tackled. Racism-related arrests at football matches were thought to be at a record low, while the atmosphere at matches was said to have been transformed from the 1970s and 1980s when overt racist abuse was commonplace (Culture, Media, and Sport Committee, 2012). But the advent and rise of social media has given racism a new, public platform and exposed as myth the view that racism has been eradicated from the sporting arena. A recent international study of hate speech concluded that social media had led to “an explosion of online bullying and hate” (ICCA, 2013: 7). Another estimated that around 10,000 racist slurs were being published each day on Twitter (Bartlett et al., 2014). Kick It Out, football’s main anti-racism and anti-discrimination organization in the UK, observed a rapid rise in the number of reports of racism it received relating to social media. This chapter critically discusses the above findings and analyzes current responses of authorities to the problem of football-related online hate speech, including those by football organizations, anti-discrimination groups, the police and legal system, and social media platforms. The chapter approaches the topic through the lens of the online disinhibition effect (Suler, 2004), which views online behaviour as having particular, psychological characteristics that tend to encourage expressions of hate and prejudice.
