Season ticket holders could be banned from games as IRFU take action on racist abuse
Vivienne Clarke
Rugby fans who engage in racial abuse of players could find their season tickets being suspended, and they could be denied access to games.
Jonathan Sebira of the organisation Signify, which aims to protect athletes and individuals from online abuse using AI and open-source data, told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland that they had been contracted by the IRFU to monitor the online threat or abuse of players.
The IRFU this week announced it will make an official complaint to gardaí in the coming days in relation to social media accounts based in Ireland linked to the racist abuse of Munster rugby's Edwin Edogbo.
Sebira said that Signify monitors social media posts that have targeted rugby 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.
"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 and then where we detect that we're looking at what is able to be done about that whether it's action from the platforms themselves or if it's more serious than other steps," Sebira said.
“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.”
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.
"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.”
