UEFA has developed an online abuse programme, aimed at monitoring and reporting to remedy cases happening during all UEFA finals and final tournaments, including in the youth categories. The programme, launched at the Women’s EURO 2022, runs until the Women’s EURO 2025 in Switzerland.
The program is keeping a close eye on all 622 social media accounts and platforms belonging to each and every participant in the UEFA EURO 2024 tournament in Germany. This includes accounts for national team members, coaches, and players.
As part of UEFA’s Environmental, Social and Governance Strategy for the EUROs tournament, they believe it is key to protect and support players, coaches, and referees in tackling their exposure to online abuse.
Players, coaches, and others should be able to concentrate on their performance on the field, according to Michele Uva, UEFA Director of Social and Environmental Sustainability, and they should not be burdened by unacceptable online abuse.
As the tournament group stage has now ended, a first interim summary is presented below:
• A total of 4,656 posts across social media platforms have been flagged for review in the group stage. These posts came from 4,070 individual accounts. Of these, 308 (7%) posts were eligible to be reported directly to the social media platforms for further action.
• 71% of these abusive posts have been actioned by the platforms.
• Reported posts were removed promptly after an average of 75 minutes.
• The teams most affected so far have been Belgium, Croatia, Ukraine and Netherlands.
• 74% of flagged posts were directed at individual players, 15% were directed at coaches, 7% targeted team accounts, and 4% targeted referees.
The monitoring of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter in the group phase has highlighted the types of abuse that players, coaches, officials, and other accounts are being subjected to.
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94% of the posts that were flagged were for generalized abuse, or abuse that does not specifically target a group or community. In addition, racist and homophobic abuse accounted for 4.5 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively.
The results of each match are shared with the teams’ national teams after the game, allowing them to report abusive content to German law enforcement authorities.
The online abuse programme will continue to run across the next stages of UEFA EURO 2024, with a full report to be shared at the end of the tournament.
