FIFA Increases Use of AI at World Cup in Bid to Reduce Player Abuse
Fifa will increase its use of AI during the World Club to ensure that teams and players are not exposed to a barrage of abuse on social media.
Fifa using AI to reduce online abuse
The technology will filter out harmful and offensive comments using 30,000 keywords across teams’ and players’ social media channels and hide them within 2 seconds. Additionally, users who post abusive content towards players can be banned from buying tickets to FIFA matches or club matches, as reported by The Guardian.
The AI tool works on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Threads, but not on X, which has always hidden comments from view.
Football players receving online abuse
During the 2021/2022 Premier League season, the Alan Turing Institute found that 2.6% of the 2.3 million tweets analyzed with a machine-learning tool contained abuse. This equates to 362 abusive tweets a day, or one every four minutes. 8.6% of those tweets were linked to race or gender.
After the 2020 Euros, a man livestreamed himself on Facebook racially abusing three Black England football players.
Tottenham and Arsenal teamed up with Respondolog to tackle the amount of online abuse on their channels. “
We estimate that we’ve removed 1.5bn hateful impressions from global football, and that’s probably a very low number. We’ve removed 15m racist and homophobic comments in global football, primarily in the Premier League. And if you think about how often every comment is seen and use a safe number of 100 that’s 1.5bn. And we’re talking about clubs that have 50m followers, athletes who have 1bn followers, so 100 is a low number,” Erik Swain, Respondology’s co-founder and CEO, said.
Image: Wesley Tingey
