A number of high-profile players including Manchester United
trio Anthony Martial, Marcus Rashford, and Axel Tuanzebe, as well as Chelsea
full-back Reece James, have been targeted on social media in recent weeks.
Instagram said it would remove accounts being used to send
abusive messages.
Fadzai Madzingira, content policy manager at Instagram's
parent company Facebook, told Britain's Press Association news agency she was
"horrified" at the vitriol directed at footballers.
"Currently, we will set a specific ban or what we call
a block for a set amount of time when someone violates those rules and we extend
that time should they continue to do so," she said.
"What we're announcing today is that we're taking
tougher measures on people who violate those rules in Instagram direct
messaging, so instead of just extending the time, we'll be removing the accounts
altogether.
"That allows us to ensure that we have a lower
tolerance for that sort of abuse in direct messaging and we'll be closing those
accounts more quickly in Instagram direct messaging than anywhere else on the
platform."
The abuse has not been restricted to private messages, with
a number of players seeing monkey emojis and racist terms left in the comment
section of posts.
A number of those accounts appear to be focused on sending
abuse, something Madzingira says Instagram continues to work on, while she
pointed to comment filters that can block certain words, phrases and emojis
from appearing.
"I think there is something about the world that we're
living in where someone can go from throwing a banana peel at a player on the
pitch to suddenly also waking up and opening their accounts and using this
online," she said.
"What we're trying to address is the online aspect but
there's definitely a broader conversation we need to have about what does
racism in sport look like and how do we stop that sort of behaviour?"
Hate speech
Instagram says it took action on 6.5 million pieces of hate
speech, including in direct messages, between July and September of last year,
with 95 percent found before anyone had reported it.
The social media platform has underlined its commitment to
working with British law enforcement agencies on such abuse, vowing to respond
to valid legal requests for information.
Preventing people from hiding behind anonymous accounts has
been repeatedly mentioned within football circles as a way of holding people to
account for the comments they make.
But Madzingira said there were "a lot of difficulties
in terms of access", giving the example of countries where identification
documents were not readily available.
The Football Association has called for action from the
British government to tackle the issue.
Ministers in December announced proposed legislation to
tackle "online harms", including the threat of fines for internet
giants.
"As a company, we've been really open," Madzingira
said. "We want to have these conversations with governments. We want to be
talking about regulation."
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