Online Safety Bill: Oral Evidence, 9 September 2021
Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill
Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill
Corrected oral evidence (1)
Thursday 9 September 2021 9.45 am
Damian Collins MP (The Chair)
Examination of witnesses: Sanjay Bhandari, Edleen John and Rio Ferdinand.
https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/2694/html/
Q19 The Chair: Good morning, and thank you to members of the second panel for joining us in this evidence session. My apologies for running slightly over on the first one.
Obviously the purpose of this committee is to look at the Government’s proposed legislation on online safety and, in particular, for this panel to discuss the prevalence of abusive behaviour towards sports stars, footballers in particular. But, of course, our focus is defined by the Bill, which is looking at online abuse. We would not, at the start of this, pretend that racist abuse exists only in online environments, and obviously scenes that we see consistently within football stadia are a particular cause of concern and not about online environments but about real and physical environments.
Rio Ferdinand, there are over 100 non-white men who have represented the England national men’s football team, yet, despite that, not even that status can protect people from the personal abuse that they can receive, particularly on social media. Given your career, how disappointing is it to you that the position still remains where this scourge of racist abuse directed towards footballers, which once upon a time we may have thought as a feature of life in the 1970s and 1980s, still affects players today?
Rio Ferdinand: Thanks for having me here, first and foremost. It baffles me. It is disheartening. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was a lot more common. We went for a period where maybe it was under the carpet or was behind the scenes a little bit more, but now you can see that the data is telling us that it is here and it is back. We saw it again in the aftermath of the Euros when the three black players missed penalties, and what happened then.
It is obviously disappointing, but at the same time when those three black players for England missed those penalties, the first thing I thought was, “Let’s see what happens on social media”. I expected what happened to happen. That is the disappointing thing: when that is your mindset immediately after a black player, who is representing the country, who is doing great things, does not make a mistake but misses a penalty and has to sit there and go through the abuse in the coming days via social media. It is totally disheartening. That is where it comes to our point on why we are here, talking on behalf of the football community and that. The players should not have to go through this, and not only the players but the people around them—their families, their friends, the various different types of supporters from all over the world, their children. They are the important people in this as well, the wider part of society and community who have to sit there and listen and see this.
AI is there for so many other different aspects on social media platforms. I have a YouTube channel, and we have copyright issues if we put a particular video up that we have not had copyright approval for. That works. We cannot find it here for certain emojis or certain words or the terminologies that are used on social media platforms. That is baffling. The technology is there.
The Chair: That is an extremely good point. All football fans will know that if, on a Saturday afternoon, you want to try to find on Twitter a goal that your team has scored, that part of the footage will be down within minutes.
Rio Ferdinand: Exactly.
The Chair: So if the technology exists to remove pirated content, why can it not be used to remove abusive content? How disappointing is it for you that, on the night after the England-Italy game, it was not just that individuals were posting comments that were not being removed, that accounts were posting content and those accounts were not being closed down, but that the recommendation tools of those platforms were highlighting and drawing attention to racial abuse as trending topics?
Rio Ferdinand: Exactly, and the perpetrators are allowed to stand behind a curtain at the moment. They are allowed to post. These keyboard warriors are allowed to say and spout all this abuse from behind a curtain. They are anonymous, and the fact that you can be anonymous online is an absolute problem for everybody in society.
This is a good example that we were speaking about before. You can go to a game, and if you threw a banana on a pitch there would be repercussions, but online you can type in and post a banana to a black player or a black person with racist connotations behind it and be fine; you are not going to get punished. There are no repercussions. How is that right? It cannot be.
Q20 The Chair: Rio, you may have comments on this as well, but, Sanjay and Edleen, it seems that that complaints have been raised consistently over the last two or three years over major incidents directed towards a series of players. The incident with Paul Pogba took place probably two years ago, yet we do not seem to get an adequate response from the companies. They do not seem to be good at removing the accounts, removing the posts, anticipating likely incidents. What has your experience been of dealing with the social media companies in raising these concerns with them?
Edleen John: Just to reiterate what Rio said, we are delighted to be here today giving evidence on behalf of football. It is important to flag from a football perspective that we have been engaging with social media organisations for years now, and what we consistently receive are platitudes. We get promises of things that will be addressed. We get told that of course racism, discrimination of any kind, is a priority. What we are seeing is that online abuse is a golden goose for social media organisations. They are able to amplify messages. They are able to make sure that the reach is broad, far and wide, and they are not tackling the problem that we are seeing across the entire football landscape.
As Rio mentioned, this is not just players and their families but coaches, administrators, referees—everybody involved in the game. It is not just football. What we are seeing from social media companies is significant resistance, a desire to just focus on a business model and make money. It is a mechanism by which they are not putting in place the protections that are so desperately needed inthe online space.
Sanjay Bhandari: Thank you, Chair, for the invitation to speak. I am grateful to have the opportunity to help to drive some change here, because that is what I want to focus on: the solutions. This revolutionary Bill—we will be the first globally to do this, as Imran said in his previous session—is a real opportunity. We must seize this opportunity.
On the types of harm, Rio talks well about the challenges he has seen as a player, as does Edleen about some of the other challenges, but this is not just about elite players. This goes all the way down to grass roots, journalists, coaches and fans. It is everyone. It is the people you do not see, not just the elite players. We also have to remember that racism does not travel alone, and what we see are the four horsemen of the Apocalypse of hate. We see hate based on race, gender, sexual orientation, disability and religion.
What is the response of social media? I have been having these conversations with them for two years. Others have been in the conversations for three and four years. My experience is that we will have conversations in London and it will be London that says, “Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe”. Then California says, “No”. I am not sure whether I am stuck in Groundhog Day or Dante’s Inferno, but either way it is a deeply unpleasant experience.
Q21 The Chair: That is why the committee is here: to try to find a way out of that hell.
Finally, from me, Rio Ferdinand, are you concerned that the prevalence of this speech, this dehumanising language on social media, is giving licence to racists, effectively—to speak out, to seek other people of similar opinions and to act in a concerted way to deliberately target and dehumanise sports stars like footballers?
Rio Ferdinand: I agree 100% with that. It is normalising racist behaviour. It is normalising racist language, if you put it in the context of a young person who supports and admires a certain player, at whatever level that is, whatever football club they support, and he is looking through that feed and seeing racist language. Maybe that player is now not his favourite player because he missed a penalty, and he is seeing the racist language that is now being put towards that person who he is now not in favour of. It normalises that type of language. That young person has seen it and then goes to his network of friends, either on social media platforms or face to face, and there are no repercussions for the person who put that online: “It’s fine, it’s normal, so I’ll do that at school and I’ll say it at school. It’s okay”.
When there are no repercussions, nothing is going to be done to put that person in place, put that person in the spotlight, take them from behind that curtain to expose them as to who they are, spouting this ridiculous, ignorant language. Then people will find it and think it is normal. I do not know what other industries there are in the world where it is okay to spout such language, be okay, get away with it and be able to hide behind a curtain, as we do online.
Q22 Dean Russell MP: If I may address you in the first instance, Mr Ferdinand, we do not often hear the real human impact of this, and I wondered if you would mind expanding on the impact this awful abuse has had on you and other players, but also on families, because I often find that in our position, in public positions, it is my family and friends who are most offended and hurt by what people might be saying about me as a politician. Would you mind expanding on that and tell some of those stories, please?
Rio Ferdinand: When you sit at home on one of these devices that we all have and that are in our hands probably 80% or 90% of the day, and you see that there is negative discrimination on there and that language is there and prominent for you to see, your self-esteem, your mental health, is at risk. It sometimes all depends on where you are in your life. Some people are at a low ebb anyway, and seeing that just has further impact. Everybody receives this type of discriminative language very differently, but it does hurt.
Again, it is important to stress that it is not just about that person. It is the wider network of that person, what it does to their friends and family. I have seen members of my family disintegrate at times with situations like this when it happens. I have seen other sports stars’ family members take it worse than the actual person who is receiving this type of language through social media.
It is hard sometimes for people to understand. Some people say, “Yeah, but it’s only coming on the phone. Just ignore it, turn it off”, and that is what a lot of the social media platforms say when you speak to them. It is down to the victim to report it or put the blocks in place through turning certain things off on your device so that you do not see it. That is not stopping the problem, is it? It is an easy cop-out for the social media platforms when they put forward ideas like that, that we can quash this situation.
Dean Russell MP: Just on that point, you mentioned your YouTube channel and copyright, and the profiteering that happens from advertising and so on. Do you think that Facebook, Twitter, these channels, are effectively profiting from prejudice as it currently stands?
Rio Ferdinand: I think they do. Imran spoke very eloquently about that. Any type of conversation is profitable and good for these companies. I am a part of that ecosystem in terms of producing content that you want to be shared and liked, but, if it is wrong, things need to be in place to make sure that it is dealt with properly, and that the repercussions are in place.
Just to go back to my point about experiences, there is another big impact from when these social media messages come through online and the hate online comes through to you as an individual. A lot of us have children, and I have to sit there and have breakfast with my kids and explain to them what the monkey emoji means in that context, what a banana means—“Dad, why is there a banana under your post? What is that about?” I am having to do that in today’s day and age where there is AI and resources available for these companies to be able to deal with these situations, so that I, as a parent, do not have to go down this road and explain that. You like to think that these people would put those things in place.
Q23 Dean Russell MP: Finally, if I may, I have been very fortunate in that I am the Watford MP, so I have got to know Luther Blissett very well, the incredible legend in England and Watford. He has told me stories of what it was like in the 1980s, the awful chanting in crowds and how especially black players broke through those barriers and we had got to a seemingly much better place over the past few years. Do you think we are going backwards now with what is happening on social media? Is that starting to be seen more in crowds, fan bases, and so on?
Rio Ferdinand: The data is telling us that. I get access, luckily, to various pieces of data, and that is what it is telling us. The police force is telling us that. It is just a knock-on effect from, “It’s okay online, so it must be okay in the stadiums”. Until you sort those situations out online, it will keep on being reflected in the stadiums. I am now part of a case. I was racially abused at a game recently, so I know from personal experience that it is becoming more normal.
Dean Russell MP: Thank you for sharing your stories.
Q24 Lord Clement-Jones: Thank you for coming today. Rio, you were talking earlier about the ability of abusers to hide behind a curtain. Edleen, in the FA evidence, and we have spoken about this previously, you go into some detail about the identity verification aspect. It is not so much that you are in favour of compulsory verification but that you believe in limiting the reach of a user who does not verify. Is that right? Is that the approach that should be taken in the Bill?
Edleen John: It is fair to say that when we think about verification, social media organisations would have us believe that it is a binary option and an on-off switch whereby people have to provide all information or no information. We believe that there are multiple layers and multiple mechanisms that can be used in combination to help tackle this issue. ID verification is one element. Default settings could be another. The limiting of reach could be another.
We think it has to be layering, because when we look at the volume of abuse that is received across the world of football, we see that a lot of the abuse is coming from burner accounts whereby people set up an account, send abusive messages, delete an account and are able to re-register another account within moments.
If there was some limitation on what could be done with a brand new account, say a cooling-off period, or if there were mechanisms by which there were certain default settings, we think that that would act as a level of deterrent to individuals who are currently setting up burner accounts and abusing people in this way.
It is not a binary situation. We recognise that there are some instances and some individuals for whom a level of anonymity is important, but we do not think that we can start with social media’s current stance whereby they feign complete ignorance about the anonymity issues, which Rio has talked about. We think that the Bill has to address this challenge.
Lord Clement-Jones: Rio, would you go for that more nuanced approach rather than insisting on everyone revealing their identity when they post?
Rio Ferdinand: I think that is right. There are some people who, for different reasons—for safety and so on—would not want everything exposed immediately from the get-go. There are layers to it, and the entry point is definitely a starting point.
Sanjay Bhandari: Yes. Ultimately, the system at the moment, and this is really about systems and processes, is too frictionless. It is too easy for someone to just turn up and abuse someone. We have to remember the online world and that abuse is not someone standing on Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park and shouting abuse into the ether. This is 150 people in a Twitter pitchfork mob turning up in your living room and spitting abuse in your eyes while your family are next door unable to do anything about it. That is the problem that we are dealing with, and that is the problem that we need to address.
We need to add more friction into the system, with all the mechanisms that we have talked about. The answer in terms of the legislative framework is to give Ofcom the power to introduce codes of practice on the reach of anonymous accounts so that they can be managed on an ongoing basis. It is also a dynamic environment. We are not legislating for the world as it is now; we also have to legislate for the world as it is going to be. We cannot anticipate all those changes, so the best thing to do is to give Ofcom the power to do that.
Q25 Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: I am sorry for appearing remotely, but thank you very much for the evidence so far. You said that you hoped we would be looking for solutions, and obviously one of those will in some form be a regulatory authority that we would be able to put some muscle behind in terms of the aspirations that we have for change, much of which we have discussed today. If we are going to avoid Groundhog Day, what do you think is the way forward for Ofcom? Do you think it has the authority, the capacity and the focus that you have been identifying as being lacking at the moment?
Sanjay Bhandari: Maybe I will take this question in the first instance, on the basis that I had a 30-year career in law and compliance, so it might be in my strata.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: You can make it a job application, if you want.
Sanjay Bhandari: My CV is available. I will go back to the start. This is an amazing opportunity that have, here in the UK, to be a global leader. We will be the first to go, but, of course, the corollary of being the first to go is that there is no rule book, no precedent that we can just cut and paste and implement.
It is sensible to give those powers to an existing regulator, and, of the existing regulators, Ofcom is by far the most sensible one, because it is used to regulating similar companies, the telecommunications companies. Social media are different to telecoms, but they are probably the nearest analogue.
Taking all Ofcom’s experience of regulating the telecoms industry is probably a sensible place to start. It then comes down to pace, power and energy, in football terms. Get on with it quickly and give them the right powers, not just the powers to enforce but the powers to supervise. My experience in other heavily regulated industries where I have spent my career is that it is the supervisory powers that tend to be the most effective. It is the ability to call for robust data transparency to deal with the volatile data that we have at the moment. You need that robust data to enable you to evolve interventions over time. It is exactly right, in the same way in which the Financial Conduct Authority has that power to call for information, that Ofcom also has those robust transparency reporting requirements, along with other powers that we have talked about in our paper.
Then, with energy, it is about giving them the resources. That means investing in them and maybe hiring people from the social media companies—having poachers turn gamekeeper. We have a track record, have we not, in all those heavily regulated industries such as banking, life sciences, utilities, telecoms, energy? Once upon a time, they were all in their regulatory infancy, and we are in our regulatory infancy. This is the time to invest the resources.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: All you have said is very heartening, and you seemed to have picked up the issues that will be required, but underpinning all this is this duty of care approach, which of course is different. It does not set the parameters exactly; it encourages a dialogue and a debate. So the regulator is not just there to police; it is also there to assess and to provide standards that will be sustainable, and, as you pointed out, that may need to change as we go forward. Do you think that is the right approach?
Sanjay Bhandari: The framework is right, with the escalating duties of care. I am aware, from the competition law and the privacy areas, that the scaling of fines relevant to turnover is a good enforcement mechanism.
It comes back to the point about us being in a dynamic environment, so a regulator needs the power to be able to call for the data to enable them to evolve. The regulator is not just about enforcement; an effective regulator is also about supervising and avoiding the problems happening in the first place, not just closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. At the moment, online abuse is like being constantly punched in the face, and it is no comfort to me to say that we are going to arrest the person who punched me in the face. I would rather you prevented someone from punching me in the face in the first place.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: There is an educational element as well.
Sanjay Bhandari: Yes.
Rio Ferdinand: I think that was a key point. The last word that was used there was education. Everyone is looking for solutions, which is fine and great and we do need that. Punishments have to be set out, but education has to be a key part of any type of reform or any type of punishment, because without that I think we would just be back to square one again. People will just accept the punishments, get right back online again and go again.
It is about educating the next generation, but also people of our ages in this room, so that they can understand that there are new languages, there are new ways of speaking, there are new ways of communicating now via social media, so you have to be careful and you have to be very aware. You have to be made aware, and education is definitely a way forward with that.
The Chair: As you said earlier, if a person has been educated through their experience, and their experience is that racist abuse exists and spreads without any kind of control, it gives the impression that this is acceptable, even when it is clearly not.
Q26 Lord Knight of Weymouth: I would like to pick up directly on that. The Bill has one clause on the duties on Ofcom with regard to media literacy. Do you think that is sufficient for education? The Football Authority evidence talked about the work that it does on education. The Bill is silent on anything to do with schools and the Department for Education. Should the Bill do more on education?
Edleen John: The reality is that we recognise that to tackle this problem it is going to need a multi-pronged approach. As it relates specifically to this Bill, we recognise that social media organisations are not eradicating the hate that we see, because there are individuals who are uneducated sitting behind a computer, and that is having a significant impact. Let us be clear: the messages are being amplified on those platforms, and that is having a significant impact and a significant reach. This is not an individual-level problem. When we look at the scale of this abuse that we are seeing on social media platforms, it is millions of posts each and every day.
Yes, education is absolutely one part of it, particularly as we look at the younger generation and the children growing up who are now engaging and using social media platforms more, but I think we have to be honest in saying that the responsibility at the moment as it relates to this Bill has to lie with how we can hold social media organisations to account so that they are not amplifying these messages when they do take place, and that we have a systems and process solution so that we are not putting a band aid over a bullet wound.
At the moment, that is what we are doing. We have community standards whereby social media organisations themselves define what can and cannot be in place and what people can and cannot see. We have seen that that is not enforced to the level that we need to protect all users on online platforms.
Yes, I recognise that education is part of tackling societal discrimination, but let us not use that as the out or the excuse for what we are seeing on social media platforms at the moment.
Q27 Suzanne Webb MP: I may have inadvertently photobombed you coming on to the estate earlier, so many apologies. It was before you arrived, but I have a feeling that I may be in that video. It is a nice link, so all’s well that ends well.
I go back to the duty of care and Ofcom. You have said that there is no rulebook and no precedent. You also talked about the band aid over a bullet wound. I am conscious that, whatever we do, we have to make it right. It has been said that this is a revolutionary Bill. Those were your words. In the previous evidence, there was reference to this being an ambitious Bill. As I say, we are very keen to get this right. Do you think the duty of care by the platforms goes far enough? Does the Bill identify that? Is it going to fix the problem, or are we going to start talking about legislation further down the road? We need to keep focusing on this.
You also talked about whether Ofcom has the right powers and the supervision powers. My concern, which I think we touched on earlier, is that the platforms will be marking their own homework, effectively. That is of great concern to me. As politicians, we are also on the receiving end of a huge amount of abuse, unnecessary abuse, and we empathise and sympathise very much about the impact. All of us in this room are very keen to get it right. Is the duty of care on platforms going to fix the problem?
Edleen John: As we look at the Bill as it stands at the moment, we recognise that a number of elements are addressed, but we in football believe that of course it can be enhanced and strengthened to make sure that it addresses the problem that we are discussing here. This is new, as Sanjay said, but that does not take away from the fact that there is some precedent in legislation at the moment that we think could be applied to this Bill.
To use one example, we already have protection for groups identified under existing legislation, the Equality Act, as being at risk. We think that should be mirrored in this Bill, as an example, so that the discriminatory abuse that Rio and others have talked about can be mitigated, and we do not see it on online platforms because social media organisations are held to account.
We also think, as Sanjay said, that Ofcom should be given powers on content that is harmful in the broadest sense, not just content that is illegal but legal content that is harmful. We absolutely recognise how difficult it is to define and clarify what legal but harmful means. Let us be clear: we think that Parliament is absolutely the best place to make that definition versus within social media organisation boardrooms, because, from what we have seen from terms and conditions and community standards thus far, it does not go far enough and it does not address the issues at hand.
There are a number of elements that we think can be further enhanced as they relate to the current Bill. On the legal but harmful piece, one of the discussions we were having this morning is that there is some precedent. I will hand over to Sanjay, because I think it is important for him to give that stance and give some context here.
Sanjay Bhandari: Sometimes people think that the legal part feels like a big grey area, and how do you legislate for that? Actually, we have some jurisprudence from elsewhere. There is a civil law cause of action in conspiracy, and conspiracy has two limbs: if lawful means conspiracy, or unlawful means conspiracy. You can conspire by lawful means and be held to be civilly responsible for that. That goes back to the 1940s and was clarified in the Lonrho v Fayed litigation in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and there has been a rich history of that economic tort.
There are two key defining characteristics. Was harm experienced in this case? Yes, tick, harm was experienced. Was it intended? Was it aimed? If you send a monkey emoji to a footballer, that is pretty clearly intended to cause harm.
We have precedents, we have jurisprudence. We just need to look at that jurisprudence from elsewhere and bring that under harmful content, because I think it is achievable.
Q28 Darren Jones MP: I am interested in this discussion about the balance in the Bill between content moderation and consequences for individuals. We have talked about both today. The Bill does not really deal with anonymity or being able to find the person who tweeted something and provide a consequence for that action, but it does deal with content moderation. I was interested when the Government said in July that they were going to extend football banning orders for abuse on social media, for example, but I do not really understand how they can do that if you cannot identify the person who tweeted the racist abuse in the first place.
I am interested in whether each of you thinks that this Bill is doing the right thing in trying to deal with content moderation first and that we should focus on getting that right, and then maybe try to deal with anonymity and individual consequences second, or whether you think it should all be included and we therefore need to make some quite fundamental reform to the draft Bill as it stands.
Rio Ferdinand: If I am being honest, you are harming yourself doing one without the other. You are holding back on one area and trying to sort out another. The anonymity is a key part of it; you need to understand and see who people are. I think that when people are made to be visible, they may think twice, and their life could change if they are now out in the open and it exposes who they are and what they have been spouting. I think that is a key part of it, but vetting the content and the social media companies understanding that go hand in hand.
The point before was whether the social media companies have the intention, the desire, to deal with discriminative online hate effectively, efficiently and quickly. Their actions have proved that it is not at the top of their list of things to do. I think that government legislation will be a key part in making sure that we get it right, and that the amendments are made and done right.
Sanjay Bhandari: I think we should be careful not to think in a unitary way—that there is only one problem and one solution. Part of the challenge here is that it is multifactorial and the problems are interconnected. We probably have to deal with all those issues, but I do not think that requires enormous, substantial changes to the Bill. It is about how you delegate the right power and authority to Ofcom to ensure that it can evolve regulation in its rules and codes of practice to meet a dynamic industry.
That is exactly what regulators do in other industries, and this is the most dynamic industry. Twitter or Facebook could be out of business in five years’ time because a competitor has come up and stolen its lunch. That is the way the industry works, and how are you going to deal with that? When the world’s greatest ice hockey player, Wayne Gretzky, was asked, “Why are you the greatest hockey player?”, he said, “Because I skate to where the puck is going to be”. We must have that mentality here and think about where the world is moving to, not just deal with the snapshot of the problem as it is today.
Edleen John: I could not agree more. A key element, as Sanjay said, is to give Ofcom the powers to create those codes of practice. Part of that will be, or should be, on the reach of anonymous accounts, because, as Rio has said, the impact of the anonymity for a lot of people across the football space is significant.
There is no singular intervention that is the panacea. It will be a combination of interventions that are going to lead us to the place where there is a solution that addresses the problem. Of course, we are here because we want to get to that place where we have a solution that protects all the users from a social media perspective and where our football players do not feel as though they are being bullied from an online platform, where they do not feel as though they are being told to sit in their front room and listen to people screaming in their eyeballs and are being told, “Just cover your ears”. We want to get to a place where there is a tangible solution in place that addresses the issue, and in order for that to happen there are some amendments that we would welcome seeing in the Bill as it stands at the moment.
The Chair: You are saying that the Bill needs to address the question of the accountability of the account holders to the platform, so that they can be identified by the platform if they were behaving in an abusive way, and that the Bill needs to be prescriptive about what should be within scope, certainly in the areas of harmful but not illegal.
Edleen John: Absolutely. I think the challenge that we see, if we think about social media organisations and some of the reports that they put out, is that they tell us that they are able to identify who is behind the abuse on their platforms, but then, as Sanjay has said, when you try to dig deeper and ask them further questions about that data, it quickly becomes clear that they do not have the level of data that they are portraying.
So tackling transparency in reporting as part of the Bill is also key for us. We have seen that post the Euros. I was saying to both Rio and Sanjay this morning that I asked social media organisations some questions the morning after the final, and weeks on I am still waiting for responses to those questions. If they have that data, it should be really easy.
The Chair: If you have not already done so, I think we would be quite interested to see what those questions are, and we might ask them ourselves.
Edleen John: Yes, I am more than happy to share.
Q29 Baroness Kidron: Edleen, we have made this incredible leap in the women’s game, and that has not really come up yet. How are women experiencing abuse and, in particular, how does that affect young girls who perhaps do not have the tradition of thinking that they might be footballers? What is that gap?
Edleen John: I think it is important to flag that this abuse is being received right from the top-flight game—England players—down to the grass roots, so including young women and players in our impairment-specific pathways. If we think specifically about young women and the challenges that lots of people face growing up, such as questioning identity, self-esteem, and all the normal teenage angst, that is of course amplified when you are a player on social media who is then being abused for a characteristic that is just part of who you are.
To use an anecdote, several players in the game have recently experienced discriminatory racist and misogynistic abuse and have reported that abuse. The abuse has been so significant that at times they have been blocked by social media companies from reporting the volume of abuse that they are receiving. We have players in the professional game who are being halted because they have reported abuse too many times. What we have at the moment is a system whereby social media organisations protect the offenders more than they protect victims. That, for us, is a significant problem.
Baroness Kidron: So, for absolute clarity, what is happening is that the victim is going to the social media company, which is saying, “You’re coming to us too many times, and that’s the problem, not the abuse you are experiencing”?
Edleen John: We have an anecdotal example of a specific player with that exact experience. They were blocked from reporting the abuse that they had consistently received, and it was other individuals who had to get involved externally to help them report it.
Q30 Baroness Kidron: I have another question, and it builds from what my colleague said. After the game, football went into No. 10 and promises were made. What were the promises, and where is the gap? What has this Bill promised to deliver for football?
Edleen John: This Bill has promised that the legislation that will be put into place will address this issue. That is why we think that the enhancements to it that we have asked for are critical if we want to address the issue. The Bill as it stands at the moment addresses some of the issues, but it does not go all the way in tackling the problem that we are seeing across the football landscape.
Sanjay Bhandari: Within a couple of days of the Euros final, the Prime Minister promised to stamp out online racism. We think that this is a good framework, but I think that the additional changes that we are suggesting give us a better chance of meeting the Prime Minister’s promise.
The Chair: I appreciate that you submitted written evidence to the inquiry. If there are specific amendments to the Bill that you think should be made, we would certainly be very interested in seeing those.
Q31 John Nicolson MP: Rio, it was very depressing when you told us that it is like being back in the 1980s and it is all just back to the way it was then. I cannot imagine what kind of person would want to throw a banana on to a football pitch or send monkey emojis. Who are these people, in your experience?
Rio Ferdinand: They are from different backgrounds, from different walks of life. In my experience, it has sometimes been a young schoolboy, 13 to 14 years old, sometimes younger. It could be an estate agent. It could be a banker. They are from all different types of life. That is the crazy thing; you cannot pinpoint one type of person from a certain background and say that it is the stereotypical racist who is putting this abuse online, or at stadiums. It is a varied demographic.
John Nicolson MP: Are there lessons from the 1980s to be learned in how we tackle it and make things better, or is the world just so different because of social media that that is where we have to focus?
Rio Ferdinand: I think the landscape is very different now with social media. We have never been in this area before. This time is very different. Again, you are allowed to be anonymous now, and that is the big difference. The fact that you can be anonymous online gives you a certain amount of power; it enables you to puff your chest out and be able to say what you feel, especially compounded by the fact that there are no repercussions now. I think all that drives numbers up, and I keep going back to the same point: we are being told by the police and so on that the data is that it is going up and is becoming more prominent.
John Nicolson MP: It is having a knock-on effect on schools and elsewhere where we hoped and believed that the experience was that things were getting better and language was improving, and you say that it is all sliding backwards.
Rio Ferdinand: Yes, it is sliding backwards. It got better. I am not saying that racism or discrimination in all forms had gone away, but it seemed to have reached a point where you were not hearing and seeing it as much, but again—
John Nicolson MP: Kids feel that they have licence because of what they see online.
Rio Ferdinand: Yes, they are empowered.
Sanjay Bhandari: Can I pick up on that point about who is doing it? It is an important segue into the bit about data transparency. This is exactly the problem. What happens is that we see an incident, we ask who is doing it, we have an absence of data, so we each fill that vacuum with our own prejudices and anecdotes. So we do not have data, we have “anecdata”. This is why we need a regulator that has the power to call for data to understand root causes and who is doing this, where they are, why they are doing this, what their age profiles are, and which interventions are going to work.
You could introduce a football banning order for online abusers, but that is only going to impact people in this country who go to matches or want to go to matches. I do not know if that is going to deal with 5% of the problem, 10% of the problem, 50% of the problem. That is the challenge we are dealing with, and the only way you are going to get there is if you have a regulator that has the power to call for the data from the organisations that have it, which is social media. We have been banging our head against a brick wall for that data and we are not getting it, so it needs to be mandated.
Edleen John: Let us be clear, to add to what Sanjay said, that as football we have tried mechanisms to look at how we can overlay and get some information and get data using our own monitoring and being proactive in approach. What social media organisations are telling us is happening and what we are finding does not correlate. It is a significant problem as it relates to the data, because social media organisations might have you believe that football banning orders are going to solve all the problems because all the online abusers are indeed football fans who go to matches every weekend.
That is not what the data that we found from a football perspective tells us, so it is critical that that data is correct and that social media organisations cannot mark their own homework or spin the statistics to tell the story that they would like to tell. Even law enforcement and the police in the discussions that we have been having with them say that they face a similar challenge in getting the relevant information out of social media organisations. Delay tactics are put in place. There is a deferring and a moving away from the specific asks, and we need that to be addressed. At the moment, it is not being addressed.
Q32 John Nicolson MP: We have heard that, and your message is very clear, Ms John. We have Stonewall coming in after you. In a previous committee session, I spoke to the then chief executive of the English Football Association, and he told me that he would not advise any footballer to come out as gay. His comments were very controversial. I thought he received a bit of a rough ride, and I do not think he intended to convey the message that some thought. I think he was saying that it was just not safe for footballers to come out. He said that he did not feel that the English Football Association could guarantee the safety of footballers if they came out. Nobody has come out since.
Rio Ferdinand: If I could answer that, I am shooting something on homophobia in football and I have just met a player who was coming out. He was advised by a lawyer not to come out and speak. Initially I thought he needed to come out, speak the truth and be proud of who he is.
John Nicolson MP: Can you say who it is?
Rio Ferdinand: No, not now. It is not for me to say that.
John Nicolson MP: Sorry, I thought you said he was coming out?
Rio Ferdinand: Yes, I have spoken to him.
John Nicolson MP: He wants to come out?
Rio Ferdinand: Let me finish, for one second. What I am trying to get at is that now I understand why the lawyer advised him not to come out. It is because every individual is different and you cannot use a blanket approach. Every individual is at a different stage of their life in understanding themselves and their sexuality. He advised him based on his experience with that individual. He did not think that he was strong enough mentally and had the right pieces in place to be able to withstand the media attention, the spotlight, all the different emotions that are going to come out and the pressures to deal with that situation at that moment in time. Initially, I was quite put back about the advice, but after it being explained by someone who has been through that process, I understood it.
John Nicolson MP: Yes, because of course everybody is different and people should not be pressurised into coming out when they are not ready to.
To go back to the FA, what the chief executive was saying was that the FA could not provide a duty of care to footballers who wanted to come out. We all know that there are footballers who are out with their families, their friends, their teammates and other folk in the club who know that they are gay, and they have to hide because they do not feel safe. That is an extraordinary position to be in in the 21st century. Would it still be the FA’s position that they do not feel that they can protect a footballer who wants to come out?
Edleen John: It is important to say that the FA are doing everything that we can to make sure that we are creating a culture of inclusivity for all individuals, irrespective of background, sexual orientation, race, religion or anything else. We are proactively striving to make sure that all players, all participants, across our game feel as though they are welcome, are respected and feel a sense of belonging. We are working with the various football leagues, the various football clubs, to make sure that we have that engagement, we have education sessions, we talk about campaigns, and make sure that we are clear that our message is that football is absolutely for all.
As part of any employer’s duty there is a duty of care, so we continue to work with clubs and leagues to make sure that any employee who works for them, so a player who works for a club, is supported and has that duty of care, that well-being support, and anything else that they might need.
John Nicolson MP: I am sorry, but it is self-evidently not working, because there is not a single out player. There is no other sport that I can think of where there are no out players. We all know that there are a lot of gay people in the world, including several members of this committee, like me. Is it not extraordinary that that is still the case? I am not blaming the FA for it necessarily, but it must say something about the type of bullying that gay people are scared about as footballers, it must say something about the reaction they are expecting to get on social media, that they do not feel that they can live their real lives and be open in sport.
My goodness, if, as a wealthy footballer, you do not feel that you can come out, what message does that send to a kid living in a housing scheme who is being bullied every day?
Rio Ferdinand: If you look at it from a different angle, you might come to a different way of thinking. In other sports—rugby players, divers most recently—the spotlight, the attention and the pressure may not be as strong. It is still a huge announcement when you are releasing that information to the public, and I am not saying that football is a bigger and better sport, but I am saying that the number of eyeballs and attention and press pages that they are going to get, and the responsibility on that person to come out, is so much bigger. Just because you are wealthier, have more followers on social media and are in a more prominent sport such as football does not mean that you are somebody who can deal with all that attention. It is very much about the individual and not about the sport. It is about being capable of coming out and being able to withstand that media attention.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: Is that why it is different in the women’s game, where there are plenty of out footballers, but not in the men’s game?
Rio Ferdinand: I would say so. It is more commonplace, and again, like you say, exactly to that point, the media attention on a female player coming out as gay and being open is far different from the men’s game, especially if it was one of the elite players at the elite football clubs. It is very different. Hopefully we will get to the point where everybody is as confident as they can be, and they know and see that the support mechanisms are behind the scenes and that the FA are trying to get them in place.
John Nicolson MP: In closing, before I hand back to the Chair, I would have to say, Ms John, that I do not believe it is because all the gay footballers in football are fragile or emotionally unprepared or any of the other reasons. A lot of them will have been through a journey and are adult men, probably many of them in happy relationships with strong support structures. There is something unique about football at the moment and the level of abuse that they fear they will get, because they see what has happened to black players. I suspect they are terrified about it, and that is a very sad place for us to be.
Edleen John: We must acknowledge that for every individual in any circumstance it is up to them to decide how and when they come out. I think the responsibility for us as football, as the authorities and the organisations, is to make sure that we create an environment where people feel supported, feel that they can come out, and feel safe. That, of course, is a priority for all our organisations across football and is a key strategic priority and objective.
As you say, a lot of individuals receive abuse in the online space at the moment when they come out, which is why we are here talking about this legislation today. It is the responsibility of all of us in this room to make sure that that is also a safe space, so that footballers can come out if they want to.
Q33 The Chair: If I may, quite a few members have follow-up questions they want to ask, and Lord Gilbert has been very patiently waiting to come in for his questions as well. John Nicolson and I were involved in an inquiry a few years ago looking at homophobia in sport. I remember then that several people said that sports stars who play at elite level in a big stadium in front of crowds learn to zone out to the white noise of what people are saying in the stadium. If you cannot do that, you cannot cope with the job that you have been asked to do.
Rio, from a player’s perspective, do you agree with that, and therefore in the social media age does social media make that worse? The abuse, rather than being a voice in a crowd that you learn to ignore, is something that is directed to you in the palm of your hand.
Rio Ferdinand: It is a great point. As a player, my experience, and I am not talking about homophobic abuse or racist abuse but any type of abuse, is that at a stadium that gets switched off after 90 minutes. I go home, it is finished, and I am out of the way now in my own house, chilling with my family, and it is fine and you do not hear it. It does have an after-effect, but it is not visible and live for me to see.
Now, with phones and different types of tablets and access to media, it is there 24/7 and you cannot hide and get away from it. That is a fact, and it is very different in that sense. It is hard to deal with, but for players—male, female, different sexualities, different races—it is a difficult place to be. Players from yesteryear, as I said to you, could deal with the situation there and then and harden themselves to it. Now, it is very difficult. Now, the bigger, wider problem, like I spoke about before, is that your wider network of friends and family and work friends take on that form of discrimination as well.
Q34 Lord Gilbert of Panteg: I want clarity about one of the things you are very specifically asking for in this Bill. I think the question is probably for Sanjay. Some of the behaviour you have been describing is illegal and ought to be dealt with under the duty of care requiring platforms to take down illegal content. I do not know about you, but I am reasonably optimistic that that is substantial progress. Some content is not illegal, and you said that you would like a much clearer definition of harmful content on the face of the Bill that incorporates the kind of material and the kind of behaviour that you are describing. It seems to me that there are two ways of doing that: either describe that on the face of the Bill as content that is harmful but still legal and therefore that gets captured by the duty of care, or just stop pussyfooting around and make it illegal. Which of those approaches do you favour?
Sanjay Bhandari: Neither. I am suggesting something in the middle, because the approach that you have suggested is static. It does not deal with the dynamism of evolving language and the evolving language of social media. If we just froze in time what is happening there and the abuse we see now, we will be back asking for more primary legislation every time people change their behaviour online. That will not work.
What I think we need to do, and we will happily come back with some more detailed suggestions, is to give Ofcom the power to regulate harmful but on its face legal content. I will give you an example. I think our guiding light in this should be the abuse that the three players received after the UEFA Euro 2020 final, because the unified public condemnation of that tells us that what the public are demanding is that each and every piece of hate that was spat out that night needs to be taken off the platforms.
We should be measuring the effectiveness of this Bill by looking at each and every piece of content, going, “Is this caught?” “Is this caught?” “Is this caught?” My fear at the moment is that it would not be, and that the way to do that is to give a regulator the power to reflect contemporary social mores and contemporary social practices as to the kind of offensive behaviour that goes on, and to require that social media companies have policies that address those.
Lord Gilbert of Panteg: Are you slightly uncomfortable with giving that societal judgment to a regulator rather than to Parliament? Is it not Parliament’s job to make those societal calls?
Sanjay Bhandari: It is a balancing act, and of course this would be delegated authority from Parliament and we might need to put some checks and balances in.
Lord Gilbert of Panteg: Have you thought about those checks and balances? It seems to me that they would be important.
Sanjay Bhandari: Again, I am very happy to come back and think in a bit more detail about what those checks and balances might be. Ultimately, we also must balance against dealing with an evolving problem. We cannot legislate through the rear-view mirror; we must legislate through the windscreen. We have to see the problems that are coming up in front of us, not just going, “Well, that’s the problem from last year. We’ve solved that”.
So what? People have moved on, and in my experience from other areas—I practised in the fraud arena, but not as a fraudster—we were experts on the fraud before last, because by the time we had got on to it they were on to something else. This is the challenge, particularly when we deal with young people, who communicate in different ways. Okay, it might be a monkey or a banana emoji now, but if you just say, “Well, we’ll make that illegal in this context”, they will move on to something else. They will find some other way. That is the challenge. If you freeze it in time, you do not have the dynamism to be able to build that.
There is no perfect answer, and we have to find a balance between having appropriate parliamentary oversight and giving appropriate delegated authority to a regulator to deal with evolving problems. We do that in other areas: we do that in banking, we do that in life sciences, we do that in utilities. All I am asking is that you give the regulator the same powers that those other regulators have.
The Chair: On that point, a lot of what you are describing there sounds like the effective enforcement of the Equality Act online.
Sanjay Bhandari: Absolutely. Parliament has already decided that there are vulnerable groups that are worthy of protection. We just need to extend that protection into this legislation.
Edleen John: We also need to recognise the context in some of those circumstances. To the point you just made about the monkey emoji, I understand that if I am referring to my child I might call them a cheeky monkey, and that that is a term of endearment and very different from the reference to a monkey emoji being aimed at a black footballer who I have no relationship, no connectivity, with, after they have just missed a penalty in a football match.
Sanjay Bhandari: These are contextual analytics businesses. Guess what? This is their business; they can do that.
Q35 Baroness Kidron: Sanjay, I want to find a little missing piece between what the Chair has just said about the Equality Act and your very clear ask for the regulator to have these powers. Do we also need to put a duty on the regulator to investigate and undertake to uphold the Equality Act? It is one thing having powers; it is another thing using those powers. Maybe it is either another safety objective of the Bill or it is somewhere where we are instructing the regulator. I would like your view on that little gap that I see developing.
Sanjay Bhandari: I think it would make sense to have the regulator do that.
Suzanne Webb MP: Following up exactly what you said, Chair, the simple fact is that none of us was born racist, sexist, a misogynist. What I see these platforms doing is creating a conditioning of people to believe and think that way. We have worked so hard with the Equality Act and so forth. If the platforms are watching, I would say that it is up to them to do something about it, not create future generations of misogynist, sexist, racist people. We have worked so hard to try to eliminate that as much as we can. That was my point.
Q36 The Chair: Finally, Edleen, you have an international relations function at the Football Association. Are these discussions which the FA has with your counterparts at FIFA and UEFA, and might there be a concerted effort by the wider football family to put pressure on the tech companies to do more in this space?
Edleen John: It is fair to say that, even if we look at the recent social media boycott earlier this year, we engaged with our counterparts in the international space. FIFA and UEFA supported our social media boycott and, indeed, some individual country FAs also supported us. We care about this topic across the entire landscape of football, not just English football, but we absolutely recognise that different countries are in different spaces and are facing different challenges. The ongoing dialogue is critical. A lot of the international community is looking to us and this opportunity that we have to put in place the first piece of legislation that will be relevant, which can become a blueprint for other organisations and indeed for other countries as well.
The Chair: International governing bodies sanction countries for the behaviour of their fans. We have seen that in countries like Hungary. Are these discussions being had an executive level at UEFA and FIFA, as far as you are aware?
Edleen John: We absolutely have conversations right to the top of the organisations on discrimination, online abuse, sanctions and what we can do as a collective of football to make it clear that we do not want this in our game and that our game is for all.
The Chair: Thank you very much. That concludes our questions. Thank you for your evidence.
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