Tommy Martin: In the age of online hate, every bit of kindness helps

Mike Dean's family received death threats on social media following West Ham’s game with Fulham last Saturday. Photo: Clive Rose/PA

Maybe Billy Burns got off lightly. It could have been worse. Especially if he was black, a woman, or a referee.

Take Mike Dean, the Premier League official whose family received death threats on social media following West Ham’s game with Fulham last Saturday.

Dean saw on his VAR monitor that West Ham’s Tomas Soucek had elbowed Fulham’s Aleksandar Mitrovic in the face and sent him off. West Ham manager David Moyes described it as “an embarrassing decision” though presumably didn’t think the referee’s family deserved to die.

But such is life in the age of hate.

It was in that context that one feared the worst for poor old Burns when he sliced that last-gasp penalty into the Welsh in-goal area. The context being one where making the slightest mistake means bracing yourself for a tsunami of online bile.

It needn’t even be a mistake. There was the case of the former England footballer Karen Carney, who last month expressed a reasonable opinion about Leeds United while working as a TV pundit.

Actually, Carney did make a mistake: being a woman, and one with an opinion. Leeds official Twitter threw her to the sexist dogs, and the ugly backlash forced her to delete her own account.

And then there are the racists. The English FA this week called on the UK government and social media companies to act after another clutch of black footballers were subjected to online racial abuse. Manchester United players Axel Tuanzebe and Lauren James were last weekend’s unlucky pair, Tuanzebe for the second time in recent weeks.

They join a lengthy list that includes United teammates Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial, Chelsea’s Antonio Rudiger and Reece James, West Brom’s Romaine Sawyers, and Southampton youngster Alex Jankewitz, who was targeted after being sent off in a game against United last week.

It now seems a black player cannot miss a chance without being sent tweets and Instagram posts featuring monkey emojis. By the way, last week Premier League clubs who complained to Twitter say the social media giant informed them that monkey emojis do not break their community rules.

So expect more where that came from.

Mind you, in the age of hate, you don’t need the cover of being a racist or a sexist or even an old-fashioned disgruntled fan.

Ireland striker Aaron Connolly deleted his social media accounts after a missed chance for Brighton late on in their 1-0 win over Tottenham saw him receive torrents of abuse from — honestly — punters who had gambled on Brighton to win 2-0.

So this is where we are and why, presumably, Burns had no sooner scuffed his kick than pre-emptive strikes were being launched calling on the mob to go easy. In fact, the number of tweets asking for online clemency on Burns’ behalf soon seemed to outnumber those actually abusing him.

See, nobody really knows anymore where the line between unacceptable abuse and reasonable criticism lies. Still, Burns will have found enough on his Instagram account to further darken the lowest moment of his professional career. The camera in the Principality Stadium caught his teammate Will Connors in a moment of tender consolation, understanding innately what failing in public means now.

In the age of hate, everyone knows the drill.

Why is sport, particularly professional football, assailed by this constant backdrop of online venom?

Everyone blames the internet. Built for the better angels of our nature, it has been hijacked by demons.

It’s hard to imagine watching sport now without social media. Twitter says user numbers spike by almost 20% for a big event like the Superbowl or a soccer World Cup. Trending topics are often dominated by live sports events. It is like a giant rambunctious beerhall or a boisterous terrace: a cacophony of opinion, jokes, and outrage.

No different to the arsehole at a match shouting invective, social media has its loudmouth gobshites.

But these voices are not isolated morons in a crowd. They are swelling global armies with direct access to the ears of their victims.

These are real world problems too. Racism, sexism, and general idiocy are afoot in society at large.

Decency is in retreat. But sport, with its dramatic emotional crescendos and deep tribal loyalties, seems to interact with the immediacy of social media in a particularly combustible way.

Psychologists talk about online dissociation. People are no longer strictly themselves. Instead they are compartmentalised versions. There’s the prim, professional ‘me’ on LinkedIn; there’s the risqué banter ‘me’ on WhatsApp; there’s the nihilistic edgelord ‘me’ on Twitter; there’s the cool, idealised ‘me’ on Instagram. Somewhere there’s the real life ‘me’ too, the one that smiles at shop assistants and calls their mother. Can that be the same person spitting venom at a stranger online?

Last year a teenager in Kerry lost a PlayStation game that featured a virtual avatar of the former Arsenal striker Ian Wright. The boy subjected the real Ian Wright, or at least the social media version of him, to a vile racist outburst in return.

Last week the boy, now a man of 18, avoided conviction by a judge who felt that the version of him that made the comments did not reflect the views of “a young, immature, and naive” person who had got caught in the heat of the moment.

Wright didn’t get the dissociation. “The supposed immaturity and naivety of our attackers is never any comfort. So yeah I am disappointed. I’m tired. We are all tired.”

People agree that social media companies should do something. They pretend they want to, but they don’t really. They drag their heels and wring their hands. They say ending anonymity would be unfair on users in repressive regimes. Anyway, plenty post vile abuse with no need for anonymity.

Meanwhile their user numbers go up and so too their share prices. Shutting down accounts is bad for business. The accounts would simply take their monkey emojis elsewhere. Look how long it took them to take down Donald Trump.

Some have argued that sports teams and players should simply walk away from social media. This is like the argument that we should stop using Amazon to protect small local retailers. It fails to understand how these companies are not just players on the field — they own the field.

So what would you do in the real world? You’d hope the arsehole was thrown out. Maybe you’d shuffle away out of earshot. But maybe you’d turn around and tell them to pipe down, a bit like what many did for poor old Billy Burns.

It wasn’t much, and maybe a bit performative, but in the age of hate every bit of kindness helps.