Rugby fans who engage in racial abuse could be denied access to games
Posts on the IRFU X and Instagram accounts celebrating Edogbo’s first cap for Ireland attracted a number of racist comments.
Rugby fans who engage in racial abuse of players could find their season tickets suspended, and they could be denied access to games.
It comes as the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) said it will be making an official complaint to gardaí in the coming days over social media accounts based in Ireland linked to the racist abuse of Munster rugby's Edwin Edogbo. The 23-year-old was born and raised in Cobh to Nigerian parents.
Last month, he made his international debut for Ireland against Italy in the Six Nations in Dublin.
The occasion was marred by online racist abuse directed at the player on the Irish Rugby social media channels. Posts on the IRFU X and Instagram accounts celebrating Edogbo’s first international cap attracted a number of racist comments.
Since then, the IRFU has been collaborating with the data technology company Signify, which aims to protect athletes and individuals from online abuse using AI and open-source data, to investigate the comments which were directed at the Munster and Ireland player.
Signify's Jonathan Sebira said it had been contracted by the IRFU to monitor the online threat or abuse of players.
“We are monitoring social media posts that are targeted at them to see if there's anything threatening or anything abusive, and the standard that we're looking for is twofold," he told RTÉ radio.
"One is the content that wouldn't be acceptable if you're in the stadium, and the other is content that exceeds what the platforms themselves say is allowed to be posted on those platforms.
“Any individual platform can only look after their own domain so companies like ours are there to give kind of a holistic view of what's actually going on and also it may be appropriate for the platforms to take action but sometimes it's more serious or sometimes it's something that the IRFU or other clients might want to action that the platforms wouldn't want to do themselves," Mr Sebira added.
The online abuse of Edogbo ranged from “explicitly racist” to debate on the “nature of Irishness”, he said.
“In this case, the majority (of the abuse) was actually coming from Irish accounts or from fans of the Ireland rugby team. There were actually quite a few based in the United States from the expat community but there was a significant amount that was kind of homegrown and coming from accounts based in Ireland.”
Apart from referring cases to law enforcement, Signify also works with rugby clubs where the people directing the online abuse could be found to be club members who attend games, where they would have access to the players.
“That is not something that the people we work with feel they should be able to do whilst they're engaging in this type of abuse and so if we identify that somebody is a season ticket holder for a club or is regularly purchasing tickets and coming to fixtures it may be the case that they're subject to banning orders from that or they're stopped from having that kind of access because of the behaviour they've engaged in," Mr Sebira added.
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