FIFA: a fifth of virtual attacks at the World Cup were racist

The International Football Federation (FIFA) revealed that, among more than 17 million posts on social networks analyzed during this year's World Cup, around 240,000 were identified as offensive - 20% of them racist. The report was released this Friday (9), the eve of World Mental Health Day, celebrated this Saturday (10).

The analysis carried out between June 9th and July 20th involved the platforms X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. The monitoring included official accounts of the 48 participating teams and 1,606 people, including 1,248 athletes, 188 coaches and technical committee members and 170 referee officials.

According to the entity, the offensive posts (240,676) were directed at 812 individuals throughout the World Cup in the United States, Mexico and Canada. In other words: 50.6% of those involved in the event suffered some type of attack. The messages are among the 477,217 that were subjected to human review after being pointed out by the artificial intelligence of FIFA's social media protection service.

This service has a tool that hides unwanted content to protect participants in competitions held by the organization. According to the federation, 60.7 million messages were broadcast on FIFA and national team platforms during the World Cup. Of the total, 9.2 million posts (15%) were automatically blocked before they were even seen by the public.

According to monitoring, a player whose name was not disclosed was the victim of more than 10,000 abusive messages, 40% of which were racist. The athlete in question was also the target of homophobia, sexism and transphobia. Also according to FIFA, attacks on him increased after racially charged comments "made by a public figure about him", which "were widely shared".

During the World Cup, Paraguayan senator Celeste Amarilla insulted striker Kylian Mbappé for X. According to her, the French captain was "colonized", "ugly", did not know how to write and tried to pass himself off as a Frenchman - the star has a Cameroonian father and a mother of Algerian origin, but was born in Paris.

The report also pointed out that 15% of the publications reviewed contained allegations of corruption - mostly directed at FIFA itself - and that 14% were violent threats, with the peak following Norway's 2-1 victory over Brazil in the round of 16. Monitoring also recorded that 12% of posts contained xenophobic attacks.

According to the study, the team that suffered the most from attacks was France, especially those of a racial nature (33%). In the case of England, racist and xenophobic offenses, combined, reached 21%. In both cases, the posts questioned the formation of the squads, given the multicultural characteristics of both teams.

"On the occasion of World Mental Health Day, we reaffirm FIFA's commitment to protecting the football community against hateful messages on the networks, with the support of cutting-edge technologies capable of combating both content created by people and images generated by artificial intelligence," said the entity's president, Gianni Infantino, in a press release.