Sport, Racism and Social Media

Neil Farrington, Lee Hall, Daniel Kilvington, John Price, Amir Saeed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781134473649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Racist abuse may at one time have been hurled across the sports stadium or scrawled on a wall. But in today's social media world it can be published to millions, from almost anywhere, in an instant.

Sport, Racism and Social Media provides the first significant, academic account of how social media is shaping the nature of racisms in sport. Among the questions it addresses are:

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• How, and why, is racism being expressed across different social media platforms and sporting contexts?

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• To what extent is social media providing new platforms for traditional prejudices or actually creating new forms of racism?

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• How can campaigners, authorities and individuals best challenge and counter these forms of racism?

Combining analysis of social media content with in-depth interviews with athletes, fans, campaigners and officials, and including extensive case studies of soccer, boxing, the NHL, the NBA, and cricket, the book provides important new insights on a familiar but ever changing story. It is essential reading for any student, researcher, media professional, administrator or policy-maker with an interest in sport, new media or the issue of racism in wider society.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203794807-1

There has been an air of complacency about racism in sport. Take football, for example. While acknowledging that more needs to be done, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) recently boasted racism was ‘on the decline’, thanks in no small part to its own campaigns (FIFA 2011). In evidence to a parliamentary investigation into racism in football, the Premier League claimed arrests at football matches to be ‘at a record low’, with arrests for racist chanting forming ‘a tiny percentage of the 13.4 million individual attendances over the course of the season’ (Premier League 2012). The subsequent report by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee stated: ‘The atmosphere experienced by those attending football matches has changed hugely since the 1970s and 80s when racial and other forms of abuse were common’ (Culture, Media and Sport Committee 2012). And even Prime Minister David Cameron has expressed a view, saying: ‘If everyone [in football] plays their role, then we can easily crush and deal with this problem’ (BBC Online, 22 February 2012).

Some of these comments were undoubtedly made with public relations in mind. But their danger is that they seriously underestimate the nature and extent of the problem. Cutting the number of arrests, or reducing the number of incidents of racist abuse, is a long way from genuinely tackling racism in sport. First, the comments downplay the complex and varied nature of racism. As Lord Herman Ouseley, Chair of Kick It Out, has observed: ‘While overt, in-your-face racism has been tackled in a way that has been tangibly managed, subtle or institutional racism is still a problem’ (Farrington et al. 2012). Second, the comments ignore the pervasive, social nature of the problem. Reducing racist behaviour within and around football grounds falls far short of addressing the underlying attitudes that lead to such behaviour. As one campaign group explained to the parliamentary committee: ‘Whilst there has been a change in behaviour at football matches, racist attitudes are still widely prevalent because racism remains a widespread problem in society’ (SRTRC 2012). Similarly, former England and Liverpool footballer John Barnes has said: ‘If you're a racist, you're not going to change your mind because a club says it's wrong to be racist … ultimately, until we get rid of it [racism] in society, it will exist in all walks of society’ (BBC Online, 22 February 2012).

To be fair to football and other sporting authorities, they can only do so much. The problem is one that also requires wider social measures and change. But the point here is that complacent statements about declining levels of racism, or being able to ‘easily crush’ the problem, actually make the issue more difficult to deal with. To ignore or underplay the problem is to add to the problem. It would be more accurate to say that racism has, to some extent, been managed by sporting authorities, rather than genuinely addressed. While overt racism may now be better policed and less socially acceptable within some sporting arenas, it has not gone away. Instead it has sought and found new outlets. One such outlet is social media – the focus of this book.

A recent international study of online hate speech concluded that the emergence of social media had led to a flood of extreme racist and other discriminatory material. It stated:

New ways of using the web (such as social networking sites like Facebook and user generated content sites such as YouTube) have led to an explosion of online bullying and hate. Social networking sites are used to promulgate hate and extremist content, increasing the depth and breadth of hate material that confronts non-extremist users.

(ICCA 2013: 7)

Among the examples cited in the report were Facebook groups called ‘Hitting Women’ and ‘Join if You Hate Homosexuals’. The report's authors stated that social networking sites were making it easier for bigots to find people with like-minded views, and to air these views to a wider and often younger audience (ICCA 2013: 9).

Bartlett et al. (2014) conducted a study analysing the use of racial, religious and ethnic slurs on Twitter. Their findings suggest that approximately 10,000 uses of these terms are published on the platform each day. The most commonly used terms are White Boy, Paki, Whitey, Pikey, Coon, Nigga and Spic. While a large proportion of the terms are being used in ‘non-derogatory’ ways, such as to express in-group solidarity, the study estimate that around 2,000 tweets per day contain examples of directed racial or ethnic prejudice (Bartlett et al. 2014).

Kick It Out have reported seeing a 43 per cent rise in the number of complaints about discriminatory posts on social media in the last year. Director Roisin Wood said:

Social media is a massive issue. Sometimes people are using the force of social media to abuse players and to abuse other fans. These are very serious indications. We can only see that going one way and that's an increase.

(Herbert 2014)

In short, social media is providing an outlet for the mass publication and sharing of racist views and abuse. Sport has been a major focus for this content through the expression of racist views, the perpetuation of racist stereotypes and the targeted abuse of sports stars. The problem is significant and getting worse. In this book we seek to explore the nature and causes of the problem before offering some suggestions for the way forward.

To some extent the book takes a national focus in that it discusses cases, police and prosecution statistics relating to the UK. However, it also presents a wider perspective on the issue by exploring global issues relating to the management and control of social media, and by considering international examples from the worlds of cricket, football, the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL). This wider perspective is crucial to an understanding of the issues because, as we discuss, social media and its content are not constrained by national borders. Furthermore, in an attempt to address the complexities of the issues, we draw on ideas from a variety of academic fields including media and cultural studies, journalism, sociology, computer science and psychology. The book combines discussion of previous studies with new empirical research including content analysis and a range of interviews with athletes, sports administrators, journalists and academics.

In Chapter 2 we provide a critical discussion of the rise of social media, defining what we mean by social media and analysing the various forms it may take.

Chapter 3 explores issues relating to the management and control of social media, discussing criticisms of organisations such as Twitter and Facebook, and examining the problems faced by national authorities in policing content and prosecuting offenders on global platforms.

Chapter 4 discusses attempts to define ‘race’ and racism before looking to the field of social psychology for insights into the causes of racist behaviour. It then examines research relating to racism and the emergence of online and digital worlds.

Chapters 5 to 8 develop and apply ideas from earlier chapters to a series of case studies across different sports. They examine how and why social media has been used to publish racist content, perpetuate racist stereotypes and target racist abuse at fans and athletes. The sports analysed are football, cricket, boxing, basketball and ice hockey.

Chapter 9 seeks to draw together the book's key findings to present recommendations on the way forward. What are the main causes of the problems of sport, racism and social media? And how can they best be tackled? Where, and by who, does action need to be taken? And what are the obstacles that need to be overcome?

If there has been complacency in some quarters about racism in sport then the constant and often alarming noises on social media should provide a wake-up call. The voices of prejudice on social media need to be better challenged and tackled. This book takes up that challenge.

2 The rise of social media

DOI: 10.4324/9780203794807-2

Introduction

What are ‘social media’? Establishing a working definition of social media and considering which platforms we deem relevant to the issues raised in this book are key concerns of this chapter. We will also provide a critical context for the discussions and case studies which follow in subsequent chapters.

Social media is a relatively new term, but it has been argued that the concept dates back millennia. Consider the example of Roman politician and cultural observer Marcus Tullius Cicero. In the first century bc this prolific chronicler penned letters containing news from Rome which could take weeks to reach the far corners of the vast empire. Those letters were passed on via a network of connected friends, often copied and quoted in a spread which we might now refer to as ‘viral’ – certainly they were communicated through social networks rather than open public channels. This form of dissemination is therefore in some ways similar to what we see today online. Among the key differences between Cicero's news and the reportage of the modern era is the speed at which information travelled and the mediating technology (Standage 2013). Cicero commented on virtually every aspect of Roman life 2,000 years ago, including the quality of gladiatorial sport. When, from a twenty-first-century viewpoint, we consider how far published discourse has come since then it is clear that in some respects it has changed very little. Commenting on sport is no longer the preserve of a privileged, educated elite. But with the lowering of barriers to publishing, sportspeople, fans and journalists alike sometimes resort to commentary that belongs in another age.

Defining social media

As Fuchs (2014) points out, for some theorists all media can be labelled as ‘social’, whether or not they involve communication between individuals or an individual and a group. Aspects of society are present in all technological artefacts we use, it is argued, and cognition itself is a social activity. While this viewpoint might provide an interesting touchtone for academic discussion in other work, it implies too broad a frame of reference for the purposes of this book so we must narrow our sights. We need to fix on a workable definition of the term.

Fortunately other theorists offer a more precise view of what social media means. Clay Shirky sees it as a user-focused label with examples defined by their contrasting qualities to the traditional, print-focused publishing described as ‘legacy media’ by Jeff Jarvis. Social media are tools to ‘increase our ability to share, to co-operate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organisations’ (Shirky 2008). The result of this freedom to create and collaborate is content which ranges from the sublime – user-generated maps of electoral wrong-doings – to the ridiculous, in the form of humorous feline memes known as ‘lolcats’ (Shirky 2011).

Elsewhere social media is practically dismissed as a buzzword driven by user-generated content, itself an internet buzzword (Boyd 2009). For Van Dijck (2013) ‘social media can be seen as online facilitators or enhancers of human networks – webs of people that promote connectedness as a social value’.

It would seem that definitions of social media are almost as numerous as the services launched under that umbrella term by tech firms seeking to emulate the success of the likes of Facebook. Certainly social media is an amorphous term. Its definition has shifted and been refined as the internet has evolved from a scientist's internal communications tool into a transformative influence in the lives of billions. The term has come to be synonymous with user generated content and the rapid dissemination of information by eyewitnesses. Social media have also been characterised variously as tools for freedom (Hebblethwaite 2014) and for repression or economic exploitation (Lovink 2008) as well as spaces that provide a ‘vacuum for abuse’ by ex-professional footballer Stan Collymore (2014).

Social media have been sometimes heralded as emblematic of the democratic nature of the web – democratic as least when it comes to publishing without the barriers endured and overcome by publishers in the pre-digital age. Others note that while social media can certainly be said to provide a means for almost anyone to broadcast to the masses, they certainly do not enrich the majority of users – in financial terms at least. Individuals who seek to make money from adverts placed on their content might aspire to become a ‘YouTube sensation’, but they are reliant on the fickle wind of virality to generate revenue, and even then it is typically a small slice of a much larger gain made by the new giants of the media landscape such as Google and Facebook.

The notion of social media as a facilitator of expression for the disenfranchised and a lever for change was popularised – largely, it must be said, thanks to mainstream media coverage – during the ‘Arab Spring’. However, the debate about social media's role in the series of popular uprisings continues (Howard and Hussain 2013). Some, such as Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, have questioned social media as a causal influence, stating: ‘It told people to go here, to do this, but the reason was social influence, not social networking’ (Reardon 2012). Others have questioned the efficacy of social media as a prompt for action (Lindsey 2013) in the context of the Arab Spring. Others have posed similar questions in the period of civil disorder in the wake of the shooting of Mark Duggan and subsequent mobilisation of communities seeking to redress any negative associations with social media through the #riotcleanup campaign (McDermott and Jaffray 2011).

Clearly we must understand the contexts of social media, their growth and use, a little better before fixing on our definition for the purposes of this study and pinpointing the platforms of most interest in the context of a discussion of race.

Growing numbers

However they are viewed, social media are a potential gift to marketeers with qualities which make them appealing to those wishing to spread a personal message or monetise global followings. They are disruptive, immediate and present an opportunity to amplify messages with minimal effort and expense. In short, it's easy to understand the draw of social media for almost everyone including professional sportspeople keen to expand their influence, reputation and earning power. Social media certainly have the capacity to break down barriers between supporters and players. Discourse in this space is relatively free from controls and operates without much state intervention on a day-to-day basis. That freedom presents significant opportunities for expression, of course, but it also poses q...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the authors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The rise of social media
• 3 Managing social media
• 4 ‘Race' and racisms in a digital world
• 5 Football, racism and social media
• 6 Cricket, racism and social media
• 7 Boxing, racism and social media
• 8 US sport, racism and social media
• 9 The way forward Explanations and recommendations
• References
• Index