How do we solve the issue of online abuse?

“If you’re a racist supporter, you are a racist supporter. The idea that you can ban someone from football but they can still go to other sports seems to me to be a mockery.”

Phillip Grindell spoke to me, speaking passionately and honestly, about the delicate situation that the sporting world finds itself in, embroiled in a debate about how we can approach the exponentially rising issue of social media abuse.

Grindell, a former Metropolitan Police detective, runs a company called Defuse. It has been labelled a ‘troll-hunting agency’ by a few media outlets, and this does partly cover the companies brief, but its main responsibility is to identify any real threats towards its clients and to, in turn, reassure them that they are safe.

“I got started in it because of Jo Cox. When Jo Cox was killed, Parliament decided they wanted a bespoke team set up to deal with all the abuse and to stop it from happening again.

“The assassination of Jo Cox struck right to the heart of parliament. She was known to be a selfless, honest politician who put the needs of those that she represented above herself and her death exposed a hidden truth at the centre of the English Government system.

“Many people were on the receiving end [of online threats and abuse], but just hadn’t chosen to talk about it.

“They almost felt like it was part of the job to get that kind of abuse and so just suck it up and deal with it. 

“MPs would say to the media ‘we’re not worried about it’, but inside Parliament, in my office, they’ll be having breakdowns.

“So there is this complete charade that they can’t be seen to say that it is upsetting them and I think that’s a kind of PR rather than reality.”

Indeed, the issue of online abuse in sport has been known of for a long time, but it is only recently, with the renewed support of the Black Lives Matter campaign, that the topic has been put under the microscope as the leaders of the sporting world look for solutions to protect their players.

Only they’re doing it all wrong.

“I think one of the problems is the security managers at some of the big football clubs. This area of threat is not their expertise but they’re not seeking external expertise, equally many of the sporting bodies don’t understand it, don’t take it seriously and don’t understand the issues around it.

“They assume that if they get the police involved and there’s a prosecution, people will be deterred or stop but the truth is that going down this route isn’t a way in which you’re going to solve the problem.

“If you take the Ian Wright scenario that happened recently, it took six to eight months for that [court case] to happen and he got nothing for it. Because everyone’s forgotten about it by that point.

“So there needs to be more immediate consequences.”

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A lot of attention has been put onto social media companies, such as Twitter and Facebook, demanding that they should require identification from those using the app, in order to make it easier to hold potential transgressors accountable for their actions.

The anger towards these social media companies was exacerbated recently when Facebook handed down a two-week messaging ban to an individual who had subjected Swansea’s Yan Dhanda to horrific racial abuse online, but Grindell says that demanding identification from users of social media will never happen.

“We will never, ever get to a situation where social media companies will ask you to identify yourself before you get an account and nor do I think they should.

“Social media is a global business and in many parts of the world, the only way to use social media safely is to be anonymous because if you’re raising issues around whistleblowing and human rights violations within governments and you are identifiable, then you put your life at risk.”

It is not a thought that has crossed the mind of many but it is one that holds water. By demanding changes to social media policies, though they are inherently flawed, we may be putting lives at risk and so we need to look at other ways of tracking down the trolls.

“First and foremost, I can tell you that if the police are looking at your IP address and it’s not in the UK they don’t investigate, because as far as they’re concerned it is outside of their jurisdiction.

“I can set the VPN that I’ve got on my system to place me anywhere in the world. So IP is a waste of time in most cases because most people, certainly if you’re doing this consciously, can hide on foreign servers.

“Very few people are genuinely anonymous on the internet. Most people who have a username will use their usernames in other places so if you follow the breadcrumbs, to use a phrase, around that, you can eventually identify who they really are in most cases.”

It was amazing to me, when talking to Grindell, just how much of what he was saying seemed painfully obvious in hindsight. There were no hidden techniques and nothing that you would need a degree to understand the basic concept of. There I was sat, with hours of preparatory research behind me, stunned that such a massive problem could be solved in such a simple way and yet few sporting officials had yet taken up his advice.

“Most sporting bodies don’t interact and exchange information so if you’re giving a football banning order why are you still allowed to go to a rugby or cricket match?

“We need a centralised system across sports to deal with this issue, I think that if you do that sort of thing then you should get lifetime bans from sports and if you can’t safely use the internet. You should be banned from the internet for a period of time.

“If you’re a racist supporter, you are a racist supporter. The idea that you can ban someone from football but they can still go to other sports seems to me to be a mockery.”

On matters of social media abuse, we need to start listening to the experts. Allowing clubs, or even groups like Kick It Out, to take the lead in these situations without the necessary expertise will only make the problem worse.

The blame does not lie with social media companies and doesn’t lie with the victims, but we need to change our approach to these situations before – as with the murder of Jo Cox – things get too far.

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