Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen has implored social media moguls to stamp out racism on their platforms, following disgusting attacks on football players after England’s Euro 2020 loss.
Stars have called out bigotry on social media after Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka were targeted with racist abuse after they missed their penalties during last night’s shootout, with Italy eventually taking home the coveted trophy.
While the likes of Piers Morgan and Giovanna Fletcher called out the abuse on Monday morning, many followers took it upon themselves to flood each player’s public page with love, in an attempt to drown out the hate.
On his own account, Oscar nominee Sacha shared an impassioned plea to the leaders of these platforms to ‘rid racism’ from their channels.
He wrote on Twitter on Monday: ‘Hey Mark Zuckerberg & @jack Dorsey — Facebook and Twitter are spreading racist attacks on these Black athletes.
‘Online racism leads to real-world hate crimes. It’s time to rid racism from your platforms once and for all!’
He added the tag #StopHateForProfit, as well as photos of the players.
In response to the abuse, Twitter released a statement condemning bigotry and stated it had removed a number of accounts from the platform.
A statement to Metro.co.uk read: ‘The abhorrent racist abuse directed at England players last night has absolutely no place on Twitter. In the past 24 hours, through a combination of machine learning based automation and human review, we have swiftly removed over 1000 Tweets and permanently suspended a number of accounts for violating our rules – the vast majority of which we detected ourselves proactively using technology.
‘We will continue to take action when we identify any Tweets or accounts that violate our policies.