Don’t feed the trolls. It’s a piece of advice that goes back to the earliest days of social media, and it remains solid. The internet is heaving with angry, anonymous, abusive people. Some have personality disorders. Some just have nasty personalities. They insult in the hope of attracting a response and, as a rule, they should not be indulged.
Last week, the entire British establishment broke that rule. The prime minister, the leader of the opposition, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the BBC decided that the biggest issue facing the nation was a series of unpleasant tweets from a handful of half-wits.
The occasion was the European soccer championship, still known as Euro 2020 for the year in which it was supposed to have been held. England reached the final for the first time in the competition’s 60-year history and drew 1-1 with Italy, meaning that the game was settled on penalties. England lost the shootout, which triggered a mass outpouring of online sympathy but also pushed a few blockheads into sending sociopathic screeds. A minority of this minority insulted the three black players who had missed their goals in racist language.
Attacking these sportsmen — one of them still a teenager — is about as low as it gets. Abusing them racially is especially revolting. Hardly anyone is going to dissent from either proposition. So, why did the BBC devote fully half of its main news bulletin to the story, pushing the announcement that the last lockdown measures were being lifted into second place? Why did politicians fall over each other to condemn, not just the disturbed tweeters, but the social media platforms themselves? Why, three days later, was the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, still using the row to attack the prime minister in Parliament?
Was it because of the scale? In total, about 1,000 tweets aimed at the three players were couched in racist terms — most of them, according to the football authorities, from accounts outside the U.K. To put this in context, there are about 6,000 tweets every second. Was this really, as the New York Times put it, an “outburst?” Or was it a feeble whimper from a tiny number of losers?
Being on the receiving end of hundreds of hostile tweets is unquestionably a nasty experience. But there is no imaginable world in which there are no internet trolls. Don’t imagine, either, that these trolls are all menacing thugs. A few of them might be, but, if you look at people previously arrested for posting threats online, they are far more likely to be recluses, alcoholics, or people with mental health problems.
Last week, the West Midlands police tweeted: “#ARRESTED| We were alerted to a series of racist messages sent to a footballer today and after looking into them and conducting checks, we have arrested a boy. The 12-year-old from #Solihull has been taken to custody. Thanks to everyone who raised it. Racism won’t be tolerated.”
Leave aside the self-congratulatory tone, suggesting that we should all be celebrating the brave police officers going after a 12-year-old boy. Leave aside, too, whether the police have their priorities right. To put the thousand tweets in perspective, there are about 300 robberies a day in the U.K. and about 3,000 assaults. No, ask yourself instead whether bigging up the mindless ramblings of a few children, addicts, and losers is really a wise policy response.
To repeat, even those thousand tweets were mainly from overseas, a pattern found across social media. The Center for Identifying Digital Hate identified 105 Instagram accounts that directed racial abuse against the three footballers. Of those whose location could be verified, the BBC found that just five were in Britain and 59 outside.
What this is really about, of course, is pushing the idea (central to the worldview of the New York Times) that Britain is an unusually racist country. Never mind that every survey suggests the opposite. Phrase the question in any way you like — having a positive view of immigration, rejecting racial stereotypes, welcoming mixed marriages — Britain is almost always at or close to the top of the global tolerance league.
But, of course, we are in an age when feelings trump facts, when anecdotes matter more than data, when we start with our conclusion and then sustain it with any statistics at hand. Just before the final, the leftist Guardian newspaper analyzed tweets sent during the earlier rounds. Out of 585,000 tweets directed at England’s soccer players, just over 2,000 were abusive, of which 44 (0.0075%) were racist. The headline? “Revealed: shocking scale of Twitter abuse targeting England: Over 2,000 abusive posts directed towards footballers during games, including scores of racist messages.”
Truly, some prejudices are impervious to numbers.
