Manchester United and England striker Marcus Rashford is one of a handful of footballers who has been racially abused online in the past few weeks. Rashford, as well as teammate Paul Pogba, have been victimized by racist trolls on Twitter since the season started.
Twitter, in an effort to combat racism on social media, made a pledge to monitor the account of the top 50 black footballers in the world.
However, Rashford sees this as pretty much useless, as he believes it doesn’t go far enough. The 21-year-old also said the solution is “easy,” maintaining that the micro-blogging platform should make users prove their identity in order to obtain access to the site. Teammate Harry Maguire tweeted a similar sentiment just last month.
“That doesn’t change anything,” the Mancunian said of Twitter’s latest initiative. “The number of accounts that are out there is ridiculous.”
“So, the way to sort of control it is that everyone in the world who uses these platforms can only have one account.
“It seems to me like things have been going backwards rather than forwards. We have to rely on the campaigns and stuff like that to deal with the situation because our voice only has so much power.”
Rashford insists that verifying identity would help root out all the keyboard tough guys who hide behind the cloak of anonymity.
“For me, it is too easy to do what you like on the internet and any of us now can go on and create accounts and write what we want under anyone’s post and no one would ever know,” he continued.
“That one would be an easy one to get rid of but there’s a lot of things that need to change. There could be a problem because right now, everybody obviously loves the sport and loves football.
“That’s all we wanted to do when we were kids and that’s still what we want to do now. For these issues to be coming up all the time, it feels a bit strange to me and I think the minute we can sort the situation out, the better it’ll be for everyone.”
“Just to see it spike in the last couple of months, it’s been unbelievable, so we want to just nip it in the bud while it’s happening.”
“It’s easy to figure it out and if you have to show identification to create an account that means everybody can only have one account. For me, there’s hundreds of thousands of people that use my name on social media and they can write what they like.”
He’s absolutely right when he says that we as a society are moving backwards, not forwards on this issue right now.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” regularly appears on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
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