The boss of the communications regulator fears sport will lose out on female stars because of online abuse – and is urging social media companies to adopt recommendations to clean up their platforms.
Ofcom has asked the likes of Elon Musk’s X and Meta-owned Instagram to offer greater protections particularly to stop misogynistic abuse and coordinated pile-ons.
“It’s really important here that the tech companies step up,” Ofcom chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes told Sky News.
It follows a year when female athletes have spoken out against the hatred messaged to them on social platforms.
After winning the Euros, England star Jess Carter revealed she has questioned whether she would have “the courage to go back on the pitch and play again” due to the abuse received during the tournament.
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Now, Ofcom is recommending a series of measures to tech giants, including:
• Prompts telling users to reconsider harmful messages
• Stopping payments for posts promoting misogynistic abuse and sexual violence
• Ensuring “for you” recommended posts have more perspectives to stop being “toxic echo chambers”
• Allowing multiple accounts to be blocked or muted at the same time
“We’re going to lose talent in sport,” Dame Melanie warned. “Lots of places where women in particular feel that if they go out there in a public role, they just get abused.
“And sometimes the toll on them and their families is not something that they can manage and they withdraw.
“So this is about actually helping people to do their jobs, to do incredible things for their country.”
These measures are not just designed to help sports stars, but they can be the most high-profile women targeted, with events watched by millions on TV.
“It’s not about curtailing anyone’s freedom of expression,” Dame Melanie said. “It’s about nudges and prompts, it is about better reporting, it is about clearer privacy settings.
“All of these ideas have come from experts or victims or survivors themselves, and we will at Ofcom be absolutely clear in our transparency reports which companies are taking it seriously and which are not, so that the public is aware of all of that.”
But what is the boundary between critiquing a performance and a pile-on that is delegitimising someone playing sport?
“It’s when it gets really intense,” Dame Melanie said. “It’s something about volume. It is when everybody joins in. And it’s also when it becomes abusive, misogynistic, racist. That’s when it crossed the line.”
There is an urgency. Sky News recently revealed suspected online hate crimes referred to police have already quadrupled this season in English football.
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Immediate action is demanded, but it won’t be for another two years that Ofcom considers asking the government to strengthen online safety laws if moves to reduce the toxicity and trolling fall short.
Ofcom says its online safety guidance was developed after speaking to victims, survivors, safety experts and women’s advocacy groups.
But for Lianne Sanderson, an England star turned broadcaster and pundit, the recommendations are still lacking.
“There needs to be online identification to have an account because someone like myself has had death threats,” she told Sky News.
“I’m a woman, a woman of colour. You know I’m gay. There’s loads of things that people can’t handle. And that’s where it comes to me. It’s not even about my job.”
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There are the pictures celebrating her marriage to wife Ellis this year attracting hate.
“Someone like myself gets abused every single day,” Sanderson said. “I posted my wedding pictures yesterday, and the amount of horrific abuse I received on those are just awful.”
It presents so many with public profiles with a quandary about whether to stay on social media when an online presence can help profile and earnings.
“They need to do more to protect people like myself because I’ve had enough, quite frankly, and it’s too much,” Sanderson said.
“I think to myself, do I come off social media? Is that them winning? But then who’s really winning? Because when I’m on my journey into London today, it’s on my mind.”
