New UK law means online racist abusers could face 10-year bans from football

21 comments
  1. Good. There’s no place for this in society, needs to include the womens game as well. This was highlighted elsewhere that you can get a football ban but watch women’s football.

  2. How will they detect these, past a few headline idiots who will post under their own name?

    Ah, there’s the measure of success: ban a very few idiots who stupidly tweet under their own name.

  3. That’s good

    There’s no excuse for racism and directed hate because of it

    No this isn’t a ‘violation of free speech’ it’s just common sense

  4. so how in the fuck they plan to police this?

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    Fun fact, article from 2019 but Sadiq Khan Online police unit wastes 1.7 Million of Public money and only had 6 Conviction, WELL DONE SADIE!

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    [https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10079592/sadiq-khan-online-police-trolls-justice/](https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10079592/sadiq-khan-online-police-trolls-justice/)

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    that’s count em, 6 Conviction across 2 years, that’s it they might have 12 now given it’s an old article, but it can be used to tell just how well this new law will be enforced.

  5. t’s a good start, but not severe enough. They need to add atleast a good fine and a possible jail sentence to it. Especially for repeat offenders.

  6. To be honest, if you’re stupid enough to post racially abusive messages online, let alone without making any effort to mask your identity, you deserve everything that’s coming to you.

    [Even Twitter went out and contradicted previous claims that all the abuse was coming from abroad.](https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/58159878)

    And as we saw from the Euro 2020 final, the people spamming racial slurs, bananas and monkey emojis at Saka, Sancho and Rashford weren’t exactly the brightest crayons in the box…

  7. As most of the racist abuse in UK football comes from outside the country, this won’t really have any effect.

  8. I think this is a terrible idea that will be lapped up by the masses. For the exact same reason I’m against the death penalty, I worry about the slippery slope where you end up being excluded from society as your social credit score got too low for being a racist (criticising the use of slaves at the world cup). We all seen what happened to the bloke with the pug, in 20 years time we could be locking up people like JK Rowling.

  9. Amazing there is such a strong relationship between racism and football fans that it’s specifically reported as related to football. Probably a lot of overlap between these idiots and the football hooligan and lager lout crowds.

  10. I’m a Mansfield fan and a guy a few weeks ago was caught making monkey noises at opposition players, he’s already been jailed for 6 months, 10 year ban on football but Mansfield have banned him for life.

  11. I don’t like this kind of thing. Attempting to make being an idiot online a police matter with long lasting consequences doesn’t seem right to me. And as you can see from the tiny number of convictions, it’s not effective anyway.

    If we want to shut down online racism then it should be the publishers of that content who are mandated to better filter it. But honestly I’m not even sure that’s a good idea – as we’ve seen in cases like Labour’s “antisemitism”, or discussions about Begum and other IS converts, it’s very easy for that kind of filtering to start impinging on sensible discussions about touchy topics.

  12. I’m not pro racist comments but I’m not a big fan of making laws about online comments. It would be very easy to impersonate soneone to have them banned.

  13. On the surface: it’s good.

    Look beneath it, however, and it’s a slippery slope IMO.

    They use online racist abusers (who, by all means, are idiots and engage in absolutely unacceptable behaviour) to shoo in laws that _can_ and probably _will_ get extended to others when/as/if that’s convenient. Just like they try to use terrorism/child abuse as an excuse to censor and police the Internet and curtail anonymity online (or outright remove it). Because some _tiny_ fraction of users engage in outright shitty behaviour, so privilege and protection needs to be taken away from **everyone**. And if you oppose it, it makes you look like you’re a nonce, an extremist supporter, or something.

    Never trust a Tory. People cheering for this today, might themselves become victims of that very same law, due to things that _they_ say, tomorrow.

  14. As much as I believe racist idiots should be punished, I don’t think it’s right that government has this much power.

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