| Social media has a mob violence problem. Could soccer hooliganism prevention offer a model for solving it? |
![YouTube said it would remove content]() | | YouTube said it would remove content "alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion" and videos denying that violent incidents occurred. Dado Ruvic/Reuters | |
| For the past two years, Steven Crowder, a right-wing YouTube personality, has directed a steady stream of homophobic and racist insults at the Vox video journalist Carlos Maza, calling him, among other things, a "lispy queer" and a "gay Mexican." (Mr. Maza is Cuban-American.) |
| But the insults themselves were only part of the problem. |
| "Every time one gets posted," Mr. Maza wrote last week in a viral Twitter thread, "I wake up to a wall of homophobic/racist abuse on Instagram and Twitter." |
| Last year, Mr. Maza's personal information, including his phone number, was posted online, with terrifying consequences. "My phone was bombarded with hundreds of texts at the exact same time," he wrote on Twitter — all identical messages ordering him to "debate Steven Crowder." Later, some of Crowder's fans sold T-shirts bearing Mr. Maza's likeness and a homophobic slur. |
| Mr. Maza is not alone. It is becoming increasingly common for groups of people, whipped into a rage by influential people on social media, to single out targets for mass campaigns of online harassment and threats. They have grown out of video gamers' anger at feminists, fury over foreign correspondents' coverage of local crises, and a London doctor's comments about the Easter bombings in Sri Lanka. In Brazil, such episodes of online mob violence have become so common that people refer to them as "online lynchings." |
| But although such attacks are harmful and proliferating, they have thus far fallen through the cracks of social media platforms' self-policing. |
| YouTube initially responded to Mr. Maza's request for help by saying that it had reviewed Mr. Crowder's videos, adding: "while we found language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted don't violate our policies." |
| YouTube later announced that Mr. Crowder's videos would be "demonetized" — removed from YouTube's advertising system — because "a pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community." A further update implied, however, that Mr. Crowder's monetization could be restored if he took certain steps, including removing links to merchandise featuring homophobic slurs. And then an update to that update to the previous update announced that the company would take a "hard look" at its harassment policies at some point in the near future. |
| The main problem seems to be that social media companies' guidelines tend to focus on content in isolation. Because the accounts that instigate the hatred and rage don't necessarily participate in the mass harassment directly — often their followers are the ones who send the death threats or do the doxxing — this problem is a poor fit for that approach. |
| So perhaps the key to addressing it is to draw lessons from another phenomenon in which a group of enraged fans attack perceived enemies: soccer hooliganism. For the unfamiliar, soccer hooliganism is when hard-core supporters of different teams clash violently, often in semi-organized gangs of "ultras." The consequences can be deadly. In the 1985 Heysel Stadium disaster, for instance, 39 people were killed and hundreds more injured when fans attacked one another during the European Cup final between English and Italian clubs. |
| European soccer associations have approached hooliganism as a team phenomenon. The problem, they recognize, takes place within an ecosystem consisting of fans, teams and league management. Addressing fan behavior as an isolated phenomenon doesn't make sense. |
| So in addition to measures like barring known hooligans from attending games, league associations have imposed punishments on the clubs themselves in order to deter fan violence. |
| After the Heysel disaster, for instance, all English teams were banned from European competition for five years. More recently, European clubs have been fined and forced to play matches in empty stadiums with no spectators after their fans hurled racist slurs, displayed racist symbols, or threw firecrackers and other dangerous items onto the field. |
| The idea is that teams are a point of leverage for their fans' behavior, not that they are fully responsible for their fans' actions. Hooliganism is about identity, about fighting for one's team against its opponents. But it becomes harder to frame fan violence that way when it hurts the team those fans are supposedly fighting for. And it also incentivizes the teams themselves, who are better able than outsiders to set the tone of their own fan culture, to demand an acceptable standard of behavior. |
| Could punishing influencers for their followers' mob attacks have a similar effect? There areclear parallels between sports fan culture and the followers of online personalities like Mr. Crowder. Communities bound together by shared fandom that has become a shared identity. An influential team or figure that everyone pays attention to, whose interests they want to defend. |
| Soccer clubs themselves rarely actively whip up anger and hate against their opponents, but social-media influencers often do. Calling out enemies is a powerful way to create a sense of group identity. And identity is a valuable tool for building an audience and a brand. Identity is what sells merchandise and tickets for speaking gigs, what creates a market for books and other spinoff content. It's where the money is. Online personalities like Mr. Crowder might not call for violence explicitly, but when they direct their fans' ire at a person like Mr. Maza, they benefit from the passion that engenders. |
| And right now, because influencers don't suffer consequences for their fans' behavior, they can get those benefits for free while offloading the costs onto the targets of their harassment. But if there were a social-media equivalent of being banned from competition or forced to play to an empty stadium, that calculus might change. |
