Weststander
Well-known member
I don't. Not at all. You don't have to look too far for abuse online in any way shape or form and Rashford's profile and job means he is going to get more than his fair share. I've seen enough screen shots of abuse from people who are way lower profile than him – comments just from one tweet or comment. The trouble with social media is that there is a snowball effect – once one person makes a racist comment (behind the comfort of anonymity a lot of the time), others are emboldened to do the same. It's disgusting.
However, racism isn't going to go away just because you give social media companies more power to 'clamp down' on it. Until you get – or even attempt to get – to the root cause of racism through education, punishment, mediation or whatever, it's never going to go away.
Asking people to just ignore it is just bizarre. How is that doing anything apart from effectively enabling racists to carry on being racist (see the USA after 4+years of Trump).
It's 2021 – there is no reason why anyone should be verbally or physically attacked for their colour of their skin, race, religion, sexuality, football team or any other aspect of their life.
The big problem with the education, punishment and mediation solution is that a huge number of these racist abusers live overseas.
We can’t wait for 200 countries to get onboard. Will Russia, China and Turkey for example be at all interested in the racist words of a few citizens posted on social media?