Racism in Football

[villa4europe]

1 minute ago, Panto_Villan said:

Hmm. There's 500 million tweets sent per day. I'm not sure what percentage of the traffic is sent to high profile people during a major event, but if we assume 1% then it's 5 million tweets, so that's 3,500 tweets every minute. If a moderator can read and judge a tweet every 15 seconds then you need 900 moderators working at all times to deal with that volume. Assuming each person works 7 hours a day you need a team of 4,340 moderators to check each tweet in realtime assuming nobody is ever absent, which seems achieveable. But if it's 10% then you need 43,400 moderators, which is much larger number, so I guess it depends on what the variables are.

There's definitely automated third-party systems that mean people can be checked against ID databases (every major regulated financial institution does it for anti money laundering purposes), so it's far less work than you think.  Why are you against ending anonymity in principle?

the checks on the tweets will be algorithms and without fully understanding it i personally think would be incredibly easy to do if they wanted

ID database is my post above, its the cost and management of protecting the data

[Panto_Villan]

3 minutes ago, villa4europe said:

the checks on the tweets will be algorithms and without fully understanding it i personally think would be incredibly easy to do if they wanted

ID database is my post above, its the cost and management of protecting the data

True, but I'm only talking about the largest social media platforms here - so mostly Facebook (which includes Instagram) and Twitter. They're massive companies that can easily afford it. Every betting site in the UK manages it because it's a legal requirement for them, so they could easily do it if they wanted to. A site like VT obviously wouldn't need to fall under that umbrella because it's not possible to send racist abuse directly to high profile celebrities on here.

The problem with algorithms is they're not good at picking up nuance and context. BBC had an article on it recently using the example of someone posting an orangutang emoji on one of Saka's tweets - in that one specific context that emoji is racist, but it's completely innocent if used in pretty much any other context. Same with the banana emoji. It's easy to blanket ban a specific word but right now most humans are smart enough to quickly find a way around most current blocking algorithms.

[HanoiVillan]

8 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

Hmm. There's 500 million tweets sent per day. I'm not sure what percentage of the traffic is sent to high profile people during a major event, but if we assume 1% then it's 5 million tweets, so that's 3,500 tweets every minute. If a moderator can read and judge a tweet every 15 seconds then you need 900 moderators working at all times to deal with that volume. Assuming each person works 7 hours a day you need a team of 4,340 moderators to check each tweet in realtime assuming nobody is ever absent, which seems achieveable. But if it's 10% then you need 43,400 moderators, which is much larger number, so I guess it depends on what the variables are.

It's just not that much traffic; looking at Rashford's post final tweets for instance he got 37k comments. That's far more than his other tweets during the tournament, which number in the hundreds or low thousands, and far more than other players (eg Harry Maguire's post-final tweet was 3.5k). At the final, you probably only need moderators to be checking 50 accounts.

16 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

Why are you against ending anonymity in principle?

Why don't I post on VillaTalk with my real name?

[HanoiVillan]

17 minutes ago, villa4europe said:

the checks on the tweets will be algorithms and without fully understanding it i personally think would be incredibly easy to do if they wanted

ID database is my post above, its the cost and management of protecting the data

There are some things that AI content moderation can do, but it's far from perfect and tends to have major problems understanding context. Tech companies understandably like tech solutions to problems, but some problems just aren't really amenable to automation. AI can't clean the toilets in Twitter's offices, so they have to hire some cleaners to do it. They need to hire people to do this job too.

An important thing is that social media platforms like to think of themselves as tech companies only, but their role in the world is fairly similar to old media companies in many ways. The BBC, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the New York Times - they have to have people monitoring comments and removing ones which don't meet 'community standards'. The scale here is somewhat bigger - though not much, compared to the biggest and most controversial topics - but also Twitter and Facebook can afford it frankly.

[Panto_Villan]

11 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

It's just not that much traffic; looking at Rashford's post final tweets for instance he got 37k comments. That's far more than his other tweets during the tournament, which number in the hundreds or low thousands, and far more than other players (eg Harry Maguire's post-final tweet was 3.5k). At the final, you probably only need moderators to be checking 50 accounts.

Why don't I post on VillaTalk with my real name?

True. But I suspect when you start to add up all the "protected" people it's going to be a lot of people. Someone like Greta Thunberg probably needs 24/7 monitoring, right? She's a child, female, has Aspergers and is a high profile target due to her activism - stopping her getting hate is probably more important than protecting millionaire male adult Marcus Rashford, right? Britney Spears is female and has high profile mental issues, so add her to the list. Taylor Swift probably gets loads of hate all the time. I imagine most high profile politicians of any stripe get horrible abuse all the time, so we should add them on. And so forth. Ultimately there's going to be thousands and thousands of people who justify protection, many far more so than footballers.

You're sort of dodging the question about anonymity. Nobody on VT posts using their real name and it's not central to modern life, so it's not the same situation as everyone on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter having to use their real name when posting (especially as almost all the people being abused are posting under their own name). And even if you disagree with the posts having to show the user's real name, you could always have the accounts (if not the display name) tied to the ID of a real person. That would still give most of the intended benefits.

Edited July 13, 2021 by Panto_Villan

[Vive_La_Villa]

I’d like to see all sports people just leave social media. They and us all managed without for long enough. They can play their football and chat to fans in interviews etc. Why have a platform to be attacked by vile people?
 

El Ghazi had the right idea. 

[Vive_La_Villa]

2 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

Nobody on VT posts using their real name

I don’t use my real name but you can all see from my profile photo who I am. 

[Davkaus]

11 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

True. But I suspect when you start to add up all the "protected" people it's going to be a lot of people. Someone like Greta Thunberg probably needs 24/7 monitoring, right? She's a child, female, has Aspergers and is a high profile target due to her activism - stopping her getting hate is probably more important than protecting millionaire male adult Marcus Rashford, right? Britney Spears is female and has high profile mental issues, so add her to the list. Taylor Swift probably gets loads of hate all the time. I imagine most high profile politicians of any stripe get horrible abuse all the time, so we should add them on. And so forth. Ultimately there's going to be thousands and thousands of people who justify protection, many far more so than footballers.

 

This is a really good point. There's a lot of focus on footballers because they've taken a stand against it, but I'd be curious if there were any stats showing footballers receive more abusive messages than other prominent individuals. 

Setting up human taskforces to combat offensive social media comments seems like a non-starter to me.

[HanoiVillan]

17 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

True. But I suspect when you start to add up all the "protected" people it's going to be a lot of people. Someone like Greta Thunberg probably needs 24/7 monitoring, right? She's a child, female, has Aspergers and is a high profile target due to her activism - stopping her getting hate is probably more important than protecting millionaire male adult Marcus Rashford, right? Britney Spears is female and has high profile mental issues, so add her to the list. Taylor Swift probably gets loads of hate all the time. I imagine most high profile politicians of any stripe get horrible abuse all the time, so we should add them on. And so forth. Ultimately there's going to be thousands and thousands of people who justify protection, many far more so than footballers.

I can't disagree that if you start getting into round-the-clock monitoring for every person of note going that you're not going to have the resources available. I think there's a happy medium that can exist in this space, eg Greta Thunberg around the clock no, Greta Thunberg for the 72 hours after she's been in the news for something yes.

19 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

You're sort of dodging the question about anonymity. Nobody on VT posts using their real name and it's not central to modern life, so it's not the same situation as everyone on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter having to use their real name when posting (especially as almost all the people being abused are posting under their own name). And even if you disagree with the posts having to show the user's real name, you could always have the accounts (if not the display name) tied to the ID of a real person. That would still give most of the intended benefits.

On the first point, people can have all sorts of reasons to want anonymity - I'm sure you can think of dozens of these for yourself, but maybe I want to complain about my employer, maybe I'm living under an assumed identity for my own safety, maybe I'm posting on social media during a quiet time at work when I'm technically supposed to be on the clock, maybe I want to criticise Conservative politicians without having Guido Fawkes going through all my public records to smear me on his website, etc etc.

On the second, I just don't think 'everyone has to identify themselves to Silicon Valley' is a moral or appropriate solution to 'racist abuse to footballers'. It's a category error that attempts to 'solve' one problem (which it doesn't completely, as lots of abuse - like the Savills guy for instance - is posted under people's real names) by creating a completely different problem.

[tomav84]

1 hour ago, villa4europe said:

The rules and costs of data protection means they'll never do it 

I would guess that even with the current set up their security is one of their highest costs, adding more personal data and then how that's stored and managed won't make it better for them 

The suggestion that you scan your ID in, driving license or passport, to gain access to twitter, the scale of the management of that for them would put them out of business and they're not exactly a small company 

Imagine if you had to do that to get on VT, how's limpid managing it? VT would be gone 

VT is a much smaller operation to the likes of facebook and twitter

to create an online gambling account you need to upload a photo of your passport/driving license before you can place a bet. they manage it just fine and they have millions of customers.

[Davkaus]

17 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

On the first point, people can have all sorts of reasons to want anonymity - I'm sure you can think of dozens of these for yourself, but maybe I want to complain about my employer, maybe I'm living under an assumed identity for my own safety, maybe I'm posting on social media during a quiet time at work when I'm technically supposed to be on the clock, maybe I want to criticise Conservative politicians without having Guido Fawkes going through all my public records to smear me on his website, etc etc.

And these are just plausible reasons in the UK, with a government that, on the full spectrum, isn't completely insane.

The moment you introduce these kind of powers to be used in a good way, you enable them being used in oppressive regimes to silence dissent. Frankly, even in the UK I think it'd be abused to expose whistleblowers.

The costs of managing identity on internet platforms is not insurmountable, but it'd be a restriction on freedom that should be opposed at every step, IMO.

Edited July 13, 2021 by Davkaus

[Panto_Villan]

17 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

On the first point, people can have all sorts of reasons to want anonymity - I'm sure you can think of dozens of these for yourself, but maybe I want to complain about my employer, maybe I'm living under an assumed identity for my own safety, maybe I'm posting on social media during a quiet time at work when I'm technically supposed to be on the clock, maybe I want to criticise Conservative politicians without having Guido Fawkes going through all my public records to smear me on his website, etc etc.

On the second, I just don't think 'everyone has to identify themselves to Silicon Valley' is a moral or appropriate solution to 'racist abuse to footballers'. It's a category error that attempts to 'solve' one problem (which it doesn't completely, as lots of abuse - like the Savills guy for instance - is posted under people's real names) by creating a completely different problem.

Yeah, on reflection I think I agree with you on the first point.

On the second point I think we'll have to agree to disagree. I think the way anonymity allows people to act when communicating with other people on social media is a serious blight on society, and footballers being racially abused is just one small part of it. It's everything from coarsening the tone of everyday debate through to allowing foreign state actors and their Twitter botfarms to interfere in our democracy via disinformation campaigns. Personally I think identifying myself to a few big companies is a price worth paying for making social media less corrosive to society (and it's not like Google and Facebook don't already know exactly who I am).

[HanoiVillan]

2 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

Yeah, on reflection I think I agree with you on the first point.

On the second point I think we'll have to agree to disagree. I think the way anonymity allows people to act when communicating with other people on social media is a serious blight on society, and footballers being racially abused is just one small part of it. It's everything from coarsening the tone of everyday debate through to allowing foreign state actors and their Twitter botfarms to interfere in our democracy via disinformation campaigns. Personally I think identifying myself to a few big companies is a price worth paying for making social media less corrosive to society (and it's not like Google and Facebook don't already know exactly who I am).

No worries, always happy to agree to disagree

On a tangent, I was interested in how Reddit and Wikipedia handle this - I'm not a member of those communities, but they do have lots of human moderation on controversial topics, while also allowing anonymity - and it seems that they either protect pages or lock them. If other social sites were looking for a tech solution, I'm sure they could automate some trigger like 'if a tweet gets X volume of reactions, then only verified users/registered accounts/accounts that are at least a week old can respond for the next 24 hours/7 days' etc. I would be okay with that too; it would also reduce the number of humans needed to moderate if there was more space to sweep up later. The bottom line, however, is they aren't looking for either my solution or yours, because both would set the precedent of making them responsible for what appears on their platforms, rather than the users.

[Guest av1]

3 hours ago, Vive_La_Villa said:

I’d like to see all sports people just leave social media. They and us all managed without for long enough. They can play their football and chat to fans in interviews etc. Why have a platform to be attacked by vile people?
 

El Ghazi had the right idea. 

I have no idea why sports players use social media, but if they did leave it sort of admits defeat which I don’t think is the way forward. 

[fruitvilla]

1 minute ago, rayk said:

Don’t chicken out, you decided to make a stand against the racism angle that Tyrone was absolutely right to highlight and now you’ve gone into your shell.

I don't think you have a good philosophical understanding of what racism is Ray. Though to be fair the emotional aspects you have down pat.

What exactly is Racism? For me it may well be multifaceted. Two being, believing a particular race (my wife assures me there is no such thing) is better than another. An a second would be acting on that belief. It could be as simple as Christian missionaries teaching Salvation to heathen Africa in Victorian times. Or perhaps more subtly, aid workers going to help Africans in some of the more impoverished parts of Africa. Quite understandably they may want share their 'privilege'. 

Would I reading (uncensored) Huckleberry Finn out aloud to a class of teenage children be considered racist? There is no intent to harm here.

There was recently a case in the States of a teacher telling a pupil they should not have used the n-word. The teacher had no intent to harm. Another pupil overheard and reported the teacher. Did the pupil who reported the teacher have an intent to harm? Luckily the teacher did not lose his job but he was investigated. 

Now, as for the stupid people who boo the knee. I will defend their right to display their stupidity. The question for me is how to bring them around to some sane position? For this we need to understand what environmental conditions brought them to their current worldview.  Their worldview may not be justified but it may be understandable.

I don't think shaming some people as a deterrent will work. We need to deal the prejudices and fears these people have. But I am lucky that I have a brain that can understand the environment I find myself shapes me. I can also understand racists are made by their environment. What was the environment that shapes your response to the situation?

[AvonVillain]

23 minutes ago, fruitvilla said:

I don't think you have a good philosophical understanding of what racism is Ray. Though to be fair the emotional aspects you have down pat.

What exactly is Racism? For me it may well be multifaceted. Two being, believing a particular race (my wife assures me there is no such thing) is better than another. An a second would be acting on that belief. It could be as simple as Christian missionaries teaching Salvation to heathen Africa in Victorian times. Or perhaps more subtly, aid workers going to help Africans in some of the more impoverished parts of Africa. Quite understandably they may want share their 'privilege'. 

Would I reading (uncensored) Huckleberry Finn out aloud to a class of teenage children be considered racist? There is no intent to harm here.

There was recently a case in the States of a teacher telling a pupil they should not have used the n-word. The teacher had no intent to harm. Another pupil overheard and reported the teacher. Did the pupil who reported the teacher have an intent to harm? Luckily the teacher did not lose his job but he was investigated. 

Now, as for the stupid people who boo the knee. I will defend their right to display their stupidity. The question for me is how to bring them around to some sane position? For this we need to understand what environmental conditions brought them to their current worldview.  Their worldview may not be justified but it may be understandable.

I don't think shaming some people as a deterrent will work. We need to deal the prejudices and fears these people have. But I am lucky that I have a brain that can understand the environment I find myself shapes me. I can also understand racists are made by their environment. What was the environment that shapes your response to the situation?

Okay good, I can find what I'm looking for here.

When I heard the Millwall fans booing the knee, I thought the obvious thing (correctly!), when I heard the Chelsea fans booing the knee, I thought the obvious thing (again, correctly!) but when I heard our own fans boo the knee, I honestly thought, Okay wait what is this...

I think people are tired of their escape from the barbarity and miseries of life being co-opted by politics. Where once a very meaningful act by Colin Kaepernick truly and bravely shook things up and made people think to the point even the President of the United States got involved to make it world news. The first game after lockdown involving Villa when all the players took the knee for the first time there was palpable sense of unity and power in the gesture. The commentators on 5Live were practically choking up. Now? Following the season after that?

For me there's barely any footballers or ex-pros worth listening to, but Wilf Zaha and John Barnes are not one of those. Zaha himself will no longer take part in this gesture, stating it's simply become part of the pre-match routine and has lost all meaning. John Barnes stated weeks back that he fears for the black players in the Euros who make mistakes or go on to miss penalties, because he understands something about society that most don't need to contend with. And the pathetic, knee-jerk posters smugly making comments for internet points on the likes of these forums probably lie in that camp, and end up closing a very valuable conversation down.

[QldVilla]

13 minutes ago, Kjøttbacken said:

Hitler saw the German peoples as a collectivist living organism, within which foreign peoples were a cancer. You could say he was xenophobic towards the Brits, and racist towards the latin and slavic peoples along with jews and gypsies. 

 

That said, Tyrone Mings has grown immensely both as a player and a character over the last two years imo. 

That’s not true regarding Hitler. He admired the royal family which had relatives that were in the Nazi Party, and was prepared to sue for peace. If it wasn’t for Churchill things may have been different, his focus was more on spreading east and tackling communism. He formed alliances with Italy and the Japanese, not xenophobic.

The Russians killed their own ethnic Jews, gypsies etc during WW2 and had a peace treaty with Germany, the issues of WW2 were a lot more complex than being some form of racist ideology. The Jewish people have been persecuted for 1000’ s of years and continues today.

I admire Tyrone for the stance he and other players are taking, I don’t agree with the knee personally because it’s too closely connected to BLM, however saying that, this is the form of protest the players want to use, they should be supported.

[fruitvilla]

2 hours ago, AvonVillain said:

I think people are tired of their escape from the barbarity and miseries of life being co-opted by politics.

This could well be true. On the other hand we divvy up parts of reality, like society, economics and politics and see them somehow as separate. They are not.

2 hours ago, AvonVillain said:

Where once a very meaningful act by Colin Kaepernick truly and bravely shook things up and made people think to the point even the President of the United States got involved to make it world news. The first game after lockdown involving Villa when all the players took the knee for the first time there was palpable sense of unity and power in the gesture. The commentators on 5Live were practically choking up. Now? Following the season after that?

Yes .. plainly for you (and me) it has stopped being a 'meaningful' act. But for the people that boo or cheer, it remains a meaningful act. It is argued that hate is not the opposite of love but indifference is. You don't appear to be at the indifference stage.

2 hours ago, AvonVillain said:

Zaha himself will no longer take part in this gesture, stating it's simply become part of the pre-match routine and has lost all meaning

That it has lost meaning for Zaha, is fair enough. Has it lost meaning for Tyrone? And most importantly, perhaps, has it lost meaning for the people that "boo"? These are the people who we are trying to reach. And if we are are looking for meaning then there's all kind of existential angst we can delve into. What is the meaning of football and supporting a club? Now, do we reach the people that "boo", that is an interesting question?

All actions have reactions. Sometimes there are unintended consequences. Such is life. 

My point being: environments shape people. ... Shape the environment if you want change. And remember you are part of the environment.

 

[QldVilla]

1 hour ago, MotoMkali said:

He seems to have dropped his Hood

(think that might be notre Dame cathedral but I'm suggesting he wouldn't be out of place in mississippi in 1964)

That's going a bit far Moto.

What Mings and co are doing is positive, but there are still a lot of people who link the knee to the incident that happened in the US and BLM.

If you want change you need to bring everyone along with you and the players need to be clear in their messaging to change the perceptions of those people.

[MotoMkali]

12 minutes ago, QldVilla said:

That's going a bit far Moto.

What Mings and co are doing is positive, but there are still a lot of people who link the knee to the incident that happened in the US and BLM.

If you want change you need to bring everyone along with you and the players need to be clear in their messaging to change the perceptions of those people.

This isn't a case where neutrality is acceptable. If you aren't for equality then you are part of the problem. It doesn't matter if you only think speaking to authorities who perpetuate violence is wrong or whether you think black people are inferior. At that point everything is equal. You either get on board and learn or you are part of the problem.

It isn't on the black players to teach a man basic human decency. It is on the man to learn it. This isn't a new thing either where he could be excused due to a transitional period. No this is a fight that has been going on for hundreds of years. 1974 is when the first equality act was, 1833 is when they abolished slavery. If he hasn't learnt in that time that all people are equal then he can get ****. There is no Room for Racism, support of Racism or implicit acceptance of Racism on this planet and certainly not in football. 

Edited July 14, 2021 by MotoMkali