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England's knockout: Finding hope among the racist rubble
Bukayo Saka knew. Marcus Rashford knew. Jadon Sancho knew. The black players in the England side who had experienced racist abuse online knew. Many of us watching at home knew.
When three of the England football team's most exciting young, black players stepped up for their country under enormous pressure to take penalties in the European Championship finals against Italy – only to miss and see England fall at the final hurdle – racist, online abuse was a crushing and depressing inevitability.
A lot of ink has been spilled about England's football culture and its relationship with racist abuse. I'd recommend starting by hearing from the players, who articulate their experience and its intersection with politics better than any columnist (here, here and here).
But now let's turn the spotlight to social media platforms. Since their advent, the presence and proliferation of anonymous, racist and misogynist trolls has been synonymous with the existence of social media.
Yet many politicians and organisations have been arguing for several years that this is not how social media has to be, that we could build a better internet if these enormous, profiteering corporations were willing to put what's best for humanity before what's best for their advertising revenue, to almost no avail.
It took a handful of young athletes with, frankly, better things to be doing than fighting for protection from tsunamis of racist, online abuse, to shift the conversation to a new and exciting place. Nobody asked them to do it, yet in speaking out so publicly, not just about their experiences, but about the role social media companies should play in protecting their users from racist abuse, they've created the thing these tech giants fear the most: chronic bad press.
Many questions still need to be answered: will this sustained pressure produce durable change from the platforms? Can lawmakers leverage public support for stronger policies that force tech companies to do more? What can be done to make sure the change is sustainable and meaningful and not just for PR?
We'll have to wait and see what the answers are. But with the much anticipated Online Harms Bill on its way, public support for more action might have come at the perfect time.
President Biden: Covid misinformation on Facebook is "killing people"
When asked by a reporter what he had to say to platforms like Facebook about the spread of Covid misinformation on their platforms, President Joe Biden's response was surprisingly stark: "They're killing people".
The fact that President Biden sees the relationship between getting information from social media and vaccine hesitancy is one thing. But the fact that the president is willing to place the blame so publically and so clearly at the feet of Facebook is very significant.
Facebook's fear of government action is evident in how much money they spent (over $19 million) on hiring lobbyists in 2020 to push back against any moves towards increased regulation that hamper their ability to make money. The fact that politicians on both sides of the Atlantic keep hauling up their CEO to answer for their actions probably doesn't help either.
President Biden began his crackdown on Big Tech a couple of weeks back, after signing an executive order to increase competition in the sector. If this latest statement is anything to go by – there is more to come.