After the Argentine national team lost to Saudi Arabia early this morning in the World Cup taking place in Doha, Qatar, the reactions from Argentine fans were not long in coming, unleashing racism with hate messages against anyone from the Middle Eastern country or anyone with dark skin.
The word "negros" became a trending topic on Twitter, a term used by users, especially Argentines, to express their anger at having lost 2-1 against the Saudi team.
Comments like “They had to be black”, “Any black person I see on the street is a black person I’ll shoot”, “These fucking black people should go fuck themselves, I hope a bomb falls on them and they all die for being faggots”, got thousands of likes on the blue bird’s social network.
There are thousands more tweets like these that continue to fuel racism on the social network now owned by billionaire Elon Musk, coming amid a growing wave of hate messages and actions around the world.
Wilfried Lemke, Special Adviser to the General Secretary of the United Nations On Sport for Development and Peace, he noted a few years ago that “sport has proven to be a cost-effective and flexible tool for promoting peace and development goals,” a situation that is not fully reflected when fans of the world's most popular sport use losses as a reason to generate racist discourse.
However, hate is currently on the rise around the world with speeches inciting violence, undermining social cohesion and tolerance, causing psychological, emotional and physical harm to those affected.
These hate speeches not only affect the specific individuals and groups they target, but also societies in general.
Sadly, its devastating impact is nothing new, but its scale and impact are greater than ever because of new technologies, making hate speech one of the most prevalent methods for spreading divisive rhetoric and ideologies on a global scale.
On November 18, Elon Musk noted in a tweet that “Twitter’s new policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach. Negative/hateful tweets will be throttled to the max and demonetized, so there will be no ads or other revenue for Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically search for it, which is no different than the rest of the internet.”
Today, that has not been reflected in the social network, which recently suffered massive staff cuts, with those who remained having to work at a forced pace.
The World Cup has only just begun and it remains to be seen what reaction it will have on fans of the teams that are being eliminated from the final.
This publication was supported in whole or part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library.
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