It looks like a losing battle. To Don Quixote who fights against windmills. How can we prevent individuals, hidden behind a screen, from insulting at will a person, in this case a football player, found guilty in absentia of having injured another? This unfortunately happened on Sunday November 28 after Yvann Maçon tackled Neymar during Saint-Etienne-Paris Saint-Germain.
After examination, the Brazilian will have 6 to 8 weeks of absence. The Parisian n ° 10 was hit in the ankle by the Stéphanois without his responsibility being obvious. But even before knowing the duration of his unavailability, social networks had already gone after Yvann Maçon.
It is with great bitterness that the#ASSE once again deplores the wave of hatred and insults suffered by one of its players on social networks after this #ASSEPSG.
Yvann Maçon or someone else, the online harassment must stop. pic.twitter.com/ulUhKGEo82
– AS Saint-Étienne (@ASSEofficiel) November 28, 2021
The player of AS Saint-Etienne, whose club immediately took the defense, is unfortunately not the first to be doomed to moan for a poorly controlled gesture, a missed opportunity in front of goal or for a lost match. Cyber harassment is indeed a scourge that has become common on media such as Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
As Philippe Lafon, the president of the National Union of Professional Footballers (UNFP), notes, “This observation is very sad, but it does not only affect sport. All strata of society are affected by this problem”. However, the phenomenon is amplified when it affects a subject as “flammable” as sport.
Not long ago, tennis player Alizé Cornet was one of the first to break the silence by publishing, of her own accord, a sinister logorrhea of insults she had received after a defeat. If the Frenchwoman had chosen to smile about it, the psychological damage caused to the athletes can nevertheless be substantial.
However, convictions exist for these culprits, and they are very dissuasive. “It goes up to 12,000 euros fine for public insults and 22,500 euros and 6 months imprisonment if they are discriminatory”, specifies Thierry Granturco, lawyer specializing in sports law. The latter also makes the distinction with the death threats, “punished by a fine of 45,000 euros and three years in prison “. However firm it may be, the legislation does not prevent hatred from proliferating under the guise of pseudonyms …
“The UNFP deplores this kind of behavior”, continues Philippe Lafon, “and supports the club and the player. And we will support the latter if he decides to take legal action.”. But, apart from moral or logistical support, which is certainly essential, what can the authorities really do against these threats, which are as violent as they are anonymous? Especially since these measures intervene a posteriori when it is necessary above all to cut the evil at the root.
A small example of what Yvann Maçon receives after today’s match. Nothing allows insults and harassment on social media. Even Neymar’s unfortunate injury. https://t.co/S5diii4spR pic.twitter.com/UJvcspdbao
– Loïc Tanzi (@Tanziloic) November 28, 2021
When questioned, the Professional Football League (LFP) provided the keys to the fight it intends to wage in this digital war. “Faced with the proliferation of hate speech on social networks, the LFP took the initiative to bring together Facebook and then Twitter last season in order to initiate a real collaborative approach to fight against hate speech online”, she declares in the preamble.
“The community managers of the clubs must not let anything go”
Professional Football League (LFP)to franceInfo: sport
Because solutions exist : “GThanks to the design of two dedicated devices on Facebook and Twitter, clubs now have a preferred solution for reporting hateful content on these platforms. The community managers of the clubs must not let anything go and the players must systematically point out all these hate messages to them and file a complaint “.
The League is well aware that there is still a long way to go before reaching a relative pacification and still regrets that‘”To date, the moderation or reporting systems put in place can still be improved and are too time-consuming”. It is with this in mind, therefore, that the instance a partnership with the French company Bodyguard, which has developed a tool for the automatic detection and removal of hate speech on the main platforms.
“Where traditional research misses up to 60% errors, Bodyguard has a 95% success rate” welcomes Frantz Lecomte, sports and music manager in this company. Based on a totally innovative system, this technology makes it possible to “contextualize” each message posted on the networks.
The algorithm will thus be able to analyze each word, each emoji and above all it will be able to restore their exact meaning to them in order to moderate them or not. Is this technical revolution, which is still in its early stages, the death knell for the flood of hatred poured out daily on the networks?