PFA’s Jason Lee says racist abuse of players on social media has reached crisis point
Jason Lee of the Professional Footballers’ Association believes we’ve reached crisis stage as racist misuse of gamers on social media proceeds.
Former striker Lee the Equalities Education Executive of the PFA, was speaking after Reading striker Yakou Meite, Tammy Abraham and Paul Pogba were recently targeted on networking platforms.
The Manchester United team-mate Marcus Rashford along with Charlton’s Lyle Taylor of pogba have been subjected to racist abuse on the web.
Lee, who played for Nottingham Forest and Watford, welcomed the first encounters that the PFA have experienced with Twitter to help eradicate the internet abuse of players, but believes must be done in order to help resolve the issue.
“We’ve come to a place where it is catastrophe so far as we’re concerned,” Lee told Sky Sports News.
“Everybody needs to come to the table, we will need to try and thrash it out and come to a conclusion and attempt to eradicate what it’s happening.
“To be fair to Twitter, they would have been among the very first to get out to people and we’ve had two encounters with them and they were positive encounters.
“Coming from this, they’ve demonstrated a real willingness to work with ourselves and enhance things and also to participate with the gamers.
“It is important they speak to the players directly. We can all talk on behalf of players but more importantly, if there’s a dialogue we have established and opened, [it can] give players the opportunity to voice their issues into the horse’s mouth.”
Twitter have also released a statement where they confirmed that they will keep working together with all the PFA and the organisation Kick Out to attempt to prevent abuse of gamers in their own stage.
“In the past two weeks, we’ve taken action on over 700 examples of abuse and hateful behavior related to UK soccer,” it read.
“This informative article has no place on the services. We will continue to take action on the minority that attempt to undermine the conversation for most.
“Working together with the PFA, we’ll participate in their participant coaching programme and will be joining a set of educational sessions using its own membership to encourage the PFA’s ambition to attack the matter.
“Working with Kick It Out, we will continue our working relationship with UK policing to further short them and provide training about our policies, processes and committed 24/7 reporting channels to law enforcement.
“we would like to play our role in curbing this improper behaviour – both offline and online – and will continue engaging with partners and clubs, protecting the conversation out of misuse, and taking rapid action on account that violate our rules”
There have been a number of events where players have been racially abused on the pitch recently, together with monkey chants aimed at Inter Milan striker Romelu Lukaku by Cagliari supporters.
A part of this Inter ultras group’Curva Nord’ then insisted the monkey chants were not meant to be racist.
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