Home Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Online harms, HC 624
Wednesday 8 September 2021
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 8 September 2021.
Members present: Yvette Cooper (Chair); Ms Diane Abbott; Simon Fell; Tim Loughton; Stuart C McDonald.
Questions 169 - 250
Witnesses
I: Anton Ferdinand, former professional footballer; Simone Pound, Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Professional Footballers’ Association; Lianne Sanderson, former professional footballer; and Marvin Sordell, former professional footballer.
II: Tara Hopkins, Director, Public Policy EMEA, Instagram; and Katy Minshall, Head of UK Public Policy, Twitter.
Witnesses: Anton Ferdinand, Simone Pound, Lianne Sanderson and Marvin Sordell.
Q169 Chair: Welcome to this evidence session for the Home Affairs Select Committee. Our evidence session today is on online racism, particularly online racism in football. We are very grateful to have our witnesses, former professional footballers Lianne Sanderson, Anton Ferdinand and Marvin Sordell, joining us this morning. Thank you. We are grateful for your time and to hear about your experiences today. We also have hopefully joining us shortly Simone Pound, the Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, from the Professional Footballers’ Association. I welcome you and express our concern that you have had to experience appalling racist abuse during your professional careers and since. I will begin with questions from Diane Abbott.
Ms Abbott: We are particularly pleased that you are able to come to give evidence because you have been professional footballers. In my experience it is always better to hear from the people at the receiving end of this stuff than people talking about it. I will come to Lianne first. In your observation has the amount of online abuse risen in recent years?
Lianne Sanderson: Yes, I would definitely say so, especially during the pandemic. I am not quite sure why, but I am a former professional footballer and now I currently work in TV and every single time I go on the television, whether that is Sky Sports or on the radio with talkSPORT, I know that a lot of abuse will come my way. I think it got better when everybody boycotted for a little while, for the three days over the weekend they did it. I joined that boycott because I am all for coming together as opposed to dividing and conquering. I think it is better to all come together, but at the end of the day people are not born racist. It is learned behaviour and I think the problem that I have is that everybody can make these fake accounts time and time again. They can get reported and nothing is done about it by the company.
It is one of those things people say to me, “Well, why don’t you come off social media altogether?” but I don’t feel like I should have to do that to make change. I have done that before and it has not quite worked. I do not fully feel like there is the support out there that understands what it is like to walk a day in the life of somebody like myself, or Anton or many other professional footballers, or not only professional footballers, anybody in the public eye. It is not a nice feeling. It is not a nice feeling for my family or for everybody around me. It certainly makes me feel sad that you feel helpless in knowing what to do going forward.
Q170 Ms Abbott: Thank you very much for that. Are there particular online platforms that the abuse occurs on?
Lianne Sanderson: Yes, it would definitely be Twitter, Instagram and it seems like Twitter more than Instagram at times. I think the problem is I have said it is like people may as well have your telephone number now, because we are all creatures of habit. After a game footballers check their phones, and I do after I have been on a show. I have decided now not to check my phone during a show because it can really impact your mental health when you read something not so nice about you. I have always said you cannot unsee something. You might get 100 messages that are nice but then you might get a couple of messages that are not nice and you think about those. I do not want that to impact me while I am on air or something like that, so I have learned to not check my phone.
I have almost become desensitised to the abuse now. Even over the weekend I was on “Soccer AM” and I had the most horrific abuse again and I spoke to my girlfriend and my family about it. I shared it on my social media platform yesterday, because I think the impact it seems to make when people see what people are writing to you is a lot more. As much as it is absolutely disgusting what people say, I find that people seem to react and respond more when I visibly share what is being written to me. I could have shared about 100 messages of what happened to me over the weekend. Like I said, I almost become desensitised to it because it is one of those things where you just think, “Well, no one is doing anything about it and I am not going to not go on TV shows based upon abuse” but then at the same time I know it is coming. You know it is going to come and that is not a nice feeling either.
Q171 Ms Abbott: Do you or does anyone acting on your behalf report the online racist abuse to Twitter or the other relevant platforms?
Lianne Sanderson: Yes, I have, people around me have, my agent has. A lot of people do. My family does, because it impacts my family too.
Q172 Ms Abbott: Then what happens, when you have reported it?
Lianne Sanderson: It says that it is not in breach of Twitter or Instagram rules and it is not offensive. You can report it in different avenues where it says, “Is it offensive?”, and it is one of those things where they come back to you and send a generic message back. You can tell it is almost like a robot or a computerised response back to you saying it is not offensive. I am not being funny, you cannot get more offensive than what is being said. So you can tell it is a generic computer response, which is also annoying. At the same time people can take down their profiles but then they can recreate one without having to go through anything to recreate it. I am sure that the same people that time and time again abuse me just recreate another account and they do it again, because you can tell by the way they are writing.
Q173 Ms Abbott: We are going to ask a little bit more about what the platforms could be doing, but let me turn to Anton. In your observation has the amount of online abuse risen for footballers?
Anton Ferdinand: Yes, I think it is there for everyone to see how much it has risen. For me personally because I am out of sight, out of mind and, like Lianne, when I do stuff on TV or I do stuff on radio I am subject to abuse, but it is not as much as it was when I was playing. It is not as much as when I went through my own situation with John Terry 10 years ago. That for me has hardened my skin so much that when I get three or four tweets or messages on Instagram it does not affect me the same way that it used to, because I am used to receiving thousands a day. Yes, it has definitely risen, as everyone can see. People are starting to speak up, people are starting to show and highlight people who are abusing them on social media platforms, so it is there for everyone to see that it is getting worse.
Q174 Ms Abbott: What particular platforms is it worst on?
Anton Ferdinand: It is on both Instagram and Twitter. Twitter is by far the worst, I would say. As you have heard, there are a lot of people talking about where is freedom of speech. People want freedom of speech and they feel they can say what they want on Twitter. I would say Twitter is probably worse than Instagram.
Q175 Ms Abbott: Have you, or somebody acting on your behalf, reported the abuse to Twitter?
Anton Ferdinand: Yes, they have and that is myself, my family, my agency being in contact with Simone Pound and going through the PFA. Like Lianne said, it is always the same response. Either nothing happens or there is a generic message that says they have not breached Twitter rules, which for me is a disgrace that it does not breach the rules. When something is tweeted about what is going on in the world today it is automatically pinpointed and dealt with, but when it is someone being racially abused or any type of discrimination suddenly it is allowed. I do not quite understand that.
Q176 Ms Abbott: I think that is terrible, that there can be any amount of racism directed to you on Twitter and Twitter says it does not breach their rules. You say you are hardened to abuse. I get a lot of abuse and what I would say is you never get hardened to it if you have to read it.
Anton Ferdinand: What I mean by I am hardened to it is the expectation of it. I am better prepared for it; it still hurts me, it still cuts me, but I am better prepared and I know that it is coming. It is like our generation to the older generation who played football, the difference between our generation and their generation is they knew it was coming. When we played we did not, so it is harder to deal with it when you do not expect it to happen and then it happens, whereas 20 to 30 years ago when they went out on the pitch they did so knowing it was going to happen, so they were prepared for it. That is what I mean by I am hardened to it. It still hits me, it still hurts me, but there is a sense of it is going to happen.
Q177 Chair: Marvin Sordell, can I bring you in to respond to the questions that Diane was asking? What has your experience been and do you feel that the online racist abuse has increased?
Marvin Sordell: It is clear to see that it has drastically increased over the past few years and I think year on year it has increased even further. Why it has done so is probably the visibility and the ease with which people can do so and get away with it has made people want to potentially do this more. They know that they have a free hit to damage someone at their very core, which is for us talking here—myself, Lianne, Anton, Simone—racial abuse. To see that as a free hit almost has allowed this situation to snowball.
In response to the questions, of course Instagram and Twitter are the two platforms that are most relevant to football players and the ones that players use the most, so they are going to be the ones that we see abuse on, I think. If football players used other platforms, if it was Snapchat or Facebook a lot more frequently, I think we would see it there too. I do not think it is necessarily to do with specific platforms. I think it is the ease with which people can contact football players en masse. My experiences are on both Twitter and Instagram different messages and death threats and “go home” and all of the like that you would expect and anticipate. Reporting them, particularly on Instagram where someone can spam your profile or a comment section with 10, 15, 20 messages of the exact same thing, you have to go through individually and delete and report each one, and often I found that they just popped straight back up. That is an issue in itself.
Beyond that, I think there is so much to this that we do not necessarily discuss about the mental impact on an individual, but also beyond that on their friends and their family, because this is not necessarily something that just affects one person. I sit here and there could be hundreds of people sitting here in the same position as me saying the same thing. The same way that I am impacted by something that happens to me, the things that I see happen to Lianne, to Anton, in the same way I am impacted. It is something that we need to take into consideration as well, not necessarily just on individual cases but on a wider scale.
Q178 Chair: When you have reported things, what has been the response that you have had from either Twitter or Instagram?
Marvin Sordell: I have just received the generic messages that pop up when you report something. I cannot remember exactly what it says, but it is along the lines of, “We have taken it into consideration” and that is that. As I said, people can resend the same message or they can spam my comments section or they can create a new account. It takes five minutes to do so and they can send the same message and replicate. I am very fortunate that I am not a player who is on the receiving end consistently. I get the odd message here and there but, as I said, there are so many people who could sit here in my position saying the same thing, as Lianne, Anton and I have said. Their situations affect me just as much as my situation is affecting me.
Q179 Chair: Thank you. Can I bring in Simone Pound? Is it your experience representing professional footballers that the problem of online racist abuse has become worse over the last few years?
Simone Pound: Yes, we know it has become significantly worse, because we have the data that evidences it. We have been monitoring social media accounts and the data scientists have demonstrated clearly the abuse has increased over the period that we have been monitoring, particularly Twitter accounts, but we know just in general the abuse is getting worse.
Q180 Chair: What about the response from Twitter and Instagram in particular? Has that improved or has that got worse?
Simone Pound: On the levels of communication with the platforms, we are in dialogue. However, given the length of time that we have been in conversations and had meetings and the need for solutions, we are not seeing what we need to see as quickly as it needs to be done.
Chair: Thank you. I think we want to follow those issues up further.
Q181 Tim Loughton: I think you will detect a degree of empathy here. As politicians we get quite a lot of abuse as well, but not nearly as much as you and your celebrity status means that you are targets for many more people.
I want to drill down to where the problem is and if it is unique to football, before we come back to the social media companies. Lianne, you said, and most people have agreed, that you think the situation has become worse, but we have been talking about online racist abuse. Do you think racist abuse at football matches has improved? I say that because we see a lot seems to have been done from those horrendous scenes years ago of all the monkey chants and people throwing things on the pitch, and because of a concerted campaign by the Footballers’ Association or whoever it is and the clubs we see less of that. Do you think it is better in person and it has migrated to online? Is that a fair assessment?
Lianne Sanderson: Yes and no. It was only last year that a banana was thrown on the field to Aubameyang in the north London derby. I think at games for some reason now you get people who see the amount of attention that people are getting from expressing their racism and homophobia. I always say in my eyes I tick all the right boxes but the wrong boxes in some people’s eyes. I am black, I am gay and a female. Those are three things that I get abuse about every single time I go on television, but I do not think it has got better in football stadiums. There were times when I have been at a game and people have said things and then I feel scared to report it to a steward because those people know it has come from me.
Yes, it is better than 30 years ago when the likes of John Barnes used to go to Millwall and stuff like that, but then again this last season people went to Millwall and got booed when they took the knee. I do not think it has improved and I do not think there is enough in place for people to report things that happen. I think it has got worse; it has always been there. It is not like racism has gone away. It is just that now people think they can get away with it, because they can, can’t they? The people who are doing things at some stadiums, they do things like the monkey chants, they throw things on the field, they get a slap on the wrist and they are allowed back in the stadium again. I think they should be banned for life. If you are racist at a football match you should not be allowed back in the stadium ever again.
Q182 Tim Loughton: It is still there but the enforcement is still too weak?
Lianne Sanderson: Yes, too weak, absolutely. For the fans—we saw the England game the other day, when they went to Hungary. The players should not have to go there and be subject to that abuse. They are doing their job and they should not have to go there and go through that.
Q183 Tim Loughton: I have to ask about in the UK. Anton, if you want to comment as well. Hungary, again horrendous from presumably mostly Hungarian fans. I am told that a lot of the online abuse that we have had recently, the notorious case of the penalties in the European Cup, comes from abroad and a number of people—
Anton Ferdinand: Sorry to cut in. If you look at the statistics, what Simone was talking about, that is not true. They have used that as a smokescreen. To answer your question before that: has racism in football ever left? No, it has not. Is the policing in the stadium maybe a bit better than it has ever been with the racism? Yes, it is better in that sense. Is it still there? Yes, but football gives the fan the opportunity to be their real self, so they go there and be their real self. If they do have any form of racism within them, it comes out at football.
The reason why I think it has lessened in a stadium is because they now have a platform to go and be their real self but they can hide, whereas in a stadium they are there, they are visible, you can see them. Now they can go behind their phone, they can have a different picture that is not them, and be their true self without their identity being shown. I think that is where the shift has come. I do not think racism has become better. It has always been there; it is just policed a bit better and now people see another way to be their true self, which is on the platforms.
Q184 Tim Loughton: Interesting. The point about a lot of the online abuse coming from abroad, particularly the Middle East for some reason, was just a smokescreen? That was not the case?
Simone Pound: Regarding the smokescreen, there has been a monitoring of accounts. However, from the monitoring that we did independently with our data science firm, Signify, during the European tournament over half of the abuse received was UK accounts. What we have been doing with monitoring is to ensure that we are able to verify accounts and find the posts and the postholders as well, which is important. We need to be able to get to the people who are sending the abuse and by monitoring and using the people who we have been working with, we have been able to, in many cases, access information that we have been able to share with law enforcement and clubs.
Q185 Tim Loughton: You are doing loads of analysis and providing lots of evidence, and then you are in a position representing the association. There is a lot of important people to go to, first, law enforcement and secondly, more importantly, to the social media companies to say, “Look, this is what is happening. We have the evidence. It is not on. What are you going to do about clamping down on it?” Are you just getting the same, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” approach of the generic responses that we have heard about from some of the individuals here?
Simone Pound: We have been able to share information with Twitter particularly, because that is the platform that we have been monitoring, and sharing information on accounts that we have identified with them monthly. Unfortunately, a number of those accounts were not taken down after three months of us sharing the information. While we are giving them information, it has not been actioned as well as it should be.
Q186 Ms Abbott: Sorry to interrupt here. Why will they not take it down? Did they give a reason for not taking it down?
Simone Pound: I understand you will be speaking to them, so perhaps it is a question to ask them. We were staggered as well. It is shocking.
Q187 Tim Loughton: I find it extraordinary that as individuals, whether it is politicians or individual sportsmen or women, when we make complaints to social media companies, we struggle to get stuff taken down and we just get the generic response, whatever it may be. When you are a powerful body representing some high-profile celebrity people who carry a lot of clout and who have huge social media platforms themselves, for Twitter to give you the same brush-off seems extraordinary. Are you taking it to another level? Are you going to say, “Right, we are going to start boycotting” as we have had some token exercises before, “and we are going to use the clout that the Professional Footballers’ Association has, and everybody we represent, to call Twitter, Instagram, out”? Are you going to take that path?
Simone Pound: I think that is what we are doing. While football is working to call the platforms out, we welcome the opportunity for you to listen, to hear what we are saying so that you can also impact and effect some change. We hope that the online harms Bill will ensure that things like this are not able to happen.
Q188 Tim Loughton: I will come back to Marvin on a general point again. We talked about football and you are all from football. Why do we not have this in other sports? I could give some examples recently in the Olympics. A lot of people watch the Olympics. It does not have such a following as football in this country and there were some cases where athletes who happened to be black had a disappointing performance, the equivalent of not scoring a penalty. Did they get this sort of abuse? I am not aware of it. Why football?
Marvin Sordell: It is a great question. I think that football is far and away the largest sport in this country, probably across the world, and so all of the participants in football, particularly at the highest level, are very much in the public eye and seen as celebrities almost. Also, football has fundamental roots within each community, each society, across the country, so every club, the national side, is almost seen as belonging to those communities and those people who belong to those communities. There is a much more emotive connection between a fan and a team and so the players who are representing that team have to perform because they are performing for those people, or it is perceived in that way. I think across other sports there is not necessarily as strong an emotive connection and so maybe people do not get as riled up with defeat and failure as much.
Q189 Tim Loughton: That is an interesting response, but there are people who are clearly complete racists and unpleasant people. Are you saying that if they happen to have good BME players in the club that they support they are prepared to not be racist towards them, but they would be racist towards a BME player from another club? Does club affinity trump their innate racism?
Marvin Sordell: We have seen it so many times across so many occasions, so many clubs. People almost use it as an excuse to say, “No, I am not racist. Our club has black players and we support them”. It is not an excuse that sits right with me but it is something that I have heard across the board so many times.
Q190 Tim Loughton: It is a terrible excuse. It is not an excuse. Where could more be done? Where does it all start? Do all roads lead back to the social media companies who have provided an opportunity for people in a less public place to let off their innate racism, as Anton said just now? You said that you do not think that racism has gone away, it is just people are expressing it in different forms. Does it all come back to the social media companies and if you cut that off it makes it more difficult for those people to let off their innate racism again?
Marvin Sordell: Yes and no. I do not necessarily think it all lies on the social media platform. They have had a huge platform and a huge opportunity to cut it down and navigate the situation a lot better than they currently are doing. As Anton alluded to before, racism in football has existed for a very long time. We are not just talking about racism on social media, because we are talking about football players in this instance as a game, a community. Racism in football has existed for as long as we all know.
If we are talking about stadiums, now there is a lot more CCTV and it is being policed better, people in crowds and fans are less tolerant to it, and people are being caught on TV and at times are being punished, maybe not harshly enough but at times they are being punished. There are some deterrents to stop people in action at the stadium whereas on social media now it is the place where it is essentially muted. I do not necessarily want to be in a position where we are talking about social media now and in 20 years’ time we are talking about something else and social media has fixed itself, but we are still talking about racism within football but through a different means. That is essentially the problem that we face here. It is not necessarily only the social media platforms. Of course, they have a big role to play right now but the wider spectrum of that is reflected in society’s relationship with football and racism being a part of that.
We need to find a way for racism to not be allowed to exist within football. At the moment it is being allowed to exist. We find these different places to place blame, whether it is stadiums, hooligans, countries overseas, social media. We find excuses to not go to the root of the problem, which is we have a problem of racism within football and at times within society as well. That is something that we need to get to the root of.
Lianne Sanderson: I would like to interject here, if I may. One of the solutions that I feel—and Anton and I have had many conversations away from here about this—is that people say it is a breach of privacy to have to have a passport or an identification to have an account, whereas I think that is the only way that this gets resolved. I do not think you can ever again stop racism, but what you can stop is people coming to you directly. People can make these fake accounts time and time again even if the account gets taken away. Yes, it might be a breach of privacy but at the same time when you get a house or a phone bill you must give your identification to do that.
I think the only way forward, for me, is to be able to give some form of identification, to be able to be on these platforms, because then people cannot hide behind a fake profile picture, as Anton said, or a fake name. Most of the time that is what they do and then they will just recreate another account. Sometimes people who are my fans say something to them and then sometimes they backtrack, but that does not mean they change how they feel, at the root of who they are. I think the solution to it—and I am not saying I am 100% right—is to have to show identification to be on these platforms.
Tim Loughton: I think many of us would agree.
Ms Abbott: That is a good idea.
Anton Ferdinand: Sorry, Chair, before we move on, picking up on something that you said, Mr Loughton, about the PFA and what they are doing to implement change and what football is doing. This is a question to all the MPs in here. If Whitehall does have the solution and is in a position where they potentially could hold the social media companies to account, would that be backed by every party publicly?
Q191 Tim Loughton: I should think so. I do not think this is a party political issue at all. There may be some people with the libertarian argument about privacy and identification, but I do not buy that at all. Of course you should have to prove who you are to set up an account that will affect people everywhere in the world. It is a hugely powerful thing, having a social media account. I think we are on the same page on that.
Simone Pound: To make the point on it being an issue for football, Marvin, Anton and Lianne made great points about the football stadium, which we know is, of course, the work environment for a footballer and has current enforcements and protected legislation that means that we can hold perpetrators to account.
I also want to make the point that it is not just football. We have had support across all sports. It is across all sports and it is also across the world. We have athletes across the world, from Europe and the States as well, who support what our players are going through. It is a global issue but something that we can work within the UK to address and impact.
Ms Abbott: On that particular point, I think I can say with confidence that the Labour Party would support what you are saying. I think Tim is correct to say that it is not a party political issue in that sense but there is a debate going on about the cancel culture and these alleged issues around freedom of speech. My concern would be that if we went the way that you are speaking about and I would support, there would be people in parts of some political parties talking about, “This is the cancel culture”. I will just say that.
Q192 Simon Fell: I am interested in the impact of this on you. You have talked about your mental health and how the online abuse has affected you, but what is your perception of how it affects young people who are supporters of you, or supporters of football, but also might want to get into football themselves? Are you seeing it impact them where maybe they are moving away from the sport and they do not want to engage?
Anton Ferdinand: I can only talk from my own personal experience. My son is eight years old and wants to play football. Whatever he chooses to do, I do not mind. If he wants to be a football player that is fine, but will my son be on social media at any given time during the next five years? No, he will not, because I feel that as his father he needs to be protected. Are the platforms a safe haven? No, they are not.
It is not just racism; it is every type of discrimination and every type of abuse that can come from a social media platform. It is wider than just racism. Yes, we are here to talk about racism but it is wider than racism. It is such a social media driven world that I know at some point it is going to be inevitable for me to say to my son that he is not allowed on it because the world is driven by social media platforms.
My job now as a father is to try to best prepare him and my daughter to be able to deal with it better than I did when I was being abused because my personal experience is I really struggled with it. The difference between being racially abused in a football stadium and being racially abused on social media is so big that people do not understand it. In a stadium if you get racial abuse there you leave the environment and you go home. It still stays with you but you leave it and go home. Every time you pick up your phone it is a constant reminder. There is no way out; you cannot get away from it. You start to feel good, you pick up your phone and you see another one and you are back in the same place that you were in before.
A lot of people have said to me, “Don’t look at it”. We all in here know that social media has been put out there and it is like a drug. You cannot put it down. Once you start scrolling you cannot put it down. That is just the way that it is. It is built to make you addicted to whatever it is that you are looking at. That is the problem with it, the mental health issue of not being able to escape it. I sit here lucky—and I use that term—that my mental health is in a better place than it ever has been, but one thing I understood about having mental health issues off the back of social media abuse is when you are dealing with mental health issues you do not know you are in it until you come out of it. That is why a lot of people do not come out of it.
I sit here lucky to say that I have come out of it, because I identified it. When I was coming out I identified that I had a problem. My worry is what are the social media companies waiting for? Are they waiting for a high-profile footballer to kill themselves or a member of their family to commit suicide? Is that what they are waiting for? If they are waiting for that, that is too late. Let us deal with the issue now. My question is always to the social media company when I have a conversation with them, “This comes down to if you really want to make change. Do you really want to?” Thus far, their words are that they want to, but their actions say different. This is the problem that we have.
Q193 Simon Fell: Lianne, you mentioned that you tick all the boxes, but that also makes you a trailblazer and you have a role in bringing people who might normally stay away from the sport or be worried about sport coming into it. How do you see this impacting people who may be gay or female wanting to get into football? Do you see this as a barrier to them?
Lianne Sanderson: Potentially but, as you mention, being the first sometimes is quite difficult. I was the first ever England player to come out, things like that, and I guess I am a trailblazer. I never think about it like that, but I would not want people to be deterred from getting into the game based upon this abuse. Then that means those people are winning.
To piggyback off what Anton said, the mental side of this, it does impact you. People do not fully understand. Days like today, the visibility about this kind of thing, hopefully it can educate the younger kids. There are some kids out there who are educated, who know about these types of things because their parents educate them. At the same time for someone like myself people often say, “Rise above it. You do not have to see it” and things like that, but it is difficult. Everybody has a breaking point and I think my breaking point was maybe two months ago. I had just come off “Sky Sports News”. We were three females on there, and I just came home to so much abuse and it was horrible and I cried to my girlfriend. It is like it is one of those things where it is important to have the right people around you, as Anton has said, because 10 years ago there was not that support at clubs. The PFA are doing fantastic work, the FA are doing fantastic work, but 10 years ago that was not in place. It is great that we can sit here as trailblazers but we need help too, and that is also why we are here.
The impact it can have on your family is massive, because it is not only myself that people come after. My mum sees it. My mum used to go on social media just to see what I was doing and she does not go on it anymore because she gets upset with what she sees, the same as my girlfriend, the same as my dad. They are your family and they care about you. Like I said, I think I have become a little desensitised because I do not want to keep coming home from the studio crying.
Thankfully, I will say that the bosses at Sky Sports called me and they do check on me. Those things have to be said because there is support out there, but when you are getting death threats, when you are getting people being horrible to you, there is only so much other people can do.
Q194 Simon Fell: Thank you. On that point of the support you receive, you say you get it from Sky Sports. How about you, Anton?
Anton Ferdinand: Mine is mainly my family, and I talk about my experience 10 years ago. I think my incident was the catalyst to change within the sport. There was not much support for me at the time. It was me versus football, it was my family versus football at the time. That is how I felt and that is what it was. Since then, moving on and since doing a documentary I think that has woken a lot of people up. It has allowed people to see and understand where they may have failed me and sometimes it takes that for people to look at themselves and say, “We need to do something about it”.
As I say, Simone and I have been in dialogue for a long time, not just since the documentary but from before that. Simone has always been good, the PFA have always been good. Could they have done more at times? Yes, but that is just my personal opinion. With other organisations it was me versus them and that is my personal experience, whereas now you see that it is getting better.
Does there need to be more? Of course there does, of course there needs to be more, but it is finding the right avenue and the right way to go about it so that the player is comfortable. You can go to speak to a player about racism but sometimes a player is scared to speak about it. I openly say in my documentary I was scared to speak. I was scared to be put in a firing line, without wanting to be in there, so it put me in a sense of someone who is known for being brazen, known for talking out, to all of a sudden being a mute, and that was not me.
The fact I was not being my true self also impacted me mentally, because I know a lot of my friends were looking at me saying, “Anton, why are you not speaking? Normally you would speak, so why are you not speaking?” They started putting pressure on me, not knowing what I am going through, because I am somebody who if something is going on in my life you would not know about it. That is just the way that I have always been. Football has always dealt with whatever it is that is going on with my private life. Football has always dealt with it. There have been two occasions where football has not been able to deal with it, and football not being able to deal with it and not having the support other than my family was hard but, like I said, I am lucky. My family are unbelievable and this is why I sit here today and I am using the term lucky.
Q195 Simon Fell: You are keeping your son off social media, so you are doing a good job. Marvin, can I bring you in on this point? How has it affected you and how are you seeing it impact young people coming into the sport?
Marvin Sordell: It has impacted me to the point where it was one of the contributing factors from me walking away from the game. At 28 I retired, so it had a big enough impact on me to decide to do that. I speak to a lot of players currently within the game. I speak to young people who are trying to get into the game, their parents as well, and there is very much an unease around wanting to go into the firing line, almost, and that happens with the success that you have as a football player. The better you are, the higher up you will go. The more you are in the public eye, the more you are in the firing line.
There is such a worry particularly from some of the parents that I speak to of young academy players who see their child and want to protect them as best as possible but at the same time they want them to have as good a career as possible, and they wonder how they are going to navigate that, or their child is going to be able to navigate that. A lot of the time there are so many entities within football that see players as collateral damage. They do not see players as necessarily things that they need to completely protect. There are most certainly individuals within the football industry who are doing great work and want to protect each player who falls under their remit, but overall it is worrying that these are the conversations I am having. I have not played professional football for over two years and yet in that time I think it has drastically changed for the worse, which I did not anticipate or expect.
It is a big worry that these are the conversations that I am having, and we are all here today to push back and reverse the emotion and reverse the direction in which we are going, because we are headed down a dangerous path. As Anton alluded to before, we cannot just wait and be reactive until something tragic happens, because at some point that may be the case and we should not have to wait and continue down this path and continue just talking without taking any action. We currently do not see racism as a serious issue, being very frank. Racism is not seen as a serious issue, because if it was we would not be having this conversation every few months, every year, every decade, as we seem to be doing. I have spoken about this I can’t tell you how many times, even in the two years since I retired let alone across the period of my career or my involvement within football.
We definitely need to take this seriously for once and decide to stamp it out because, as we have seen with other instances that have come up within football, the Super League for example, everybody within football was quick to act but that was because it affected the financial implications of so many entities within football. When things affect finances people seem to react quickly, whereas racism does not affect finances as of yet. That is the issue that we face. The problem that we face is that because it is not affecting anything financial, we almost tend to brush it under the carpet and allow it to build up. We deal with it later. We find a way to paper over the cracks for now to almost appease people until the next generation comes through and they have to face the same problem through different means.
This is why we need to stop having these conversations, essentially, because I do not want to keep having these conversations and neither do Lianne, Simone and Anton. We want to stop having these conversations and for there to be action.
Q196 Chair: What should happen now? All of your words are powerful about the impact of racism on people’s mental health and on people’s lives and the huge damage that it does. Our next panel is to talk specifically to the social media companies. Are there particular things that you would like us to put to them? What is your challenge to them about what should change?
Marvin Sordell: It is a top-down and bottom-up approach. From the bottom up, you are looking at education and speaking to young people and getting a deeper understanding of the implications of racial abuse and also any type of abuse or any form of abuse that may come and getting people to understand that people’s differences are what make them amazing, what make them beautiful, what make us all great as human beings.
From the top down, there need to be harsher punishments for sure. As I said, racism is not taken seriously. It is almost seen as something that we can just deal with and brush off. It is like a fly that we swat away almost and we do not necessarily deal with it once and for all.
For the social media companies, as Lianne said, a form of identification that is attached to a profile should be considered. I do not necessarily agree that people’s personal profiles, their pictures and their accounts necessarily have to have their actual names on them because of course I understand there are people who cannot necessarily do that because of their safety and so on. But if I wanted to report that account, that account should be attached to somebody who is held accountable. Social media has evolved so that it is not necessarily just an application that sits on your phone like a game or whatever it was initially. We are talking about giant platforms that have the capacity to shape governments, shape societies and change the world. The most powerful people in the world sit on social media. It should not necessarily be taken as just looking at an application.
As well as that, if I were to say something that somebody else said to me, someone with an account that was public, there would be serious implications for me and so that should be the case across the board.
Q197 Chair: Anton, can I ask you what you would put to the social media companies and what action you think they need to take?
Anton Ferdinand: Like Marvin said, that is the biggest thing that I could not understand when I have spoken to Twitter and Instagram personally. I could not fathom the fact that if someone with a blue tick abused or said something they should not have said, we were held accountable for what we said. We could get fired, fined, banned from playing. But for someone abusing us, there is no accountability. That I could not fathom. I could not understand that.
But there are two ways. When you look at the technology, everyone has predictive text on their phones, so there is a technology that can identify the context of whatever you are saying because if it could not it would not be able to predict your sentence. There must be technology that can identify the context of the word “monkey”, the context of the N-word or the context of saying to a woman about ironing or “get back in the kitchen”. There must be a technology that can identify the context of a tweet and, if it identifies that the context is wrong, you should not physically be able to send that message. With Twitter especially, if you go over 160 characters, you cannot physically press the “tweet” button. If the context of your tweet is wrong, you should not physically be able to tweet that message. That is one aspect.
Identification is one that I feel strongly about. Their rebuttal to that is always that not everyone has ID across the world, not everyone has this, not everyone has that. But they have a duty of care to the people that are using the platform. If they don’t have ID, don’t be on it. If there is a solution where there can be two sides to the platform, put that in place if you are scared about losing numbers.
Q198 Chair: To follow with you Lianne, you have clearly said your view about the anonymity problem, but what is your response to Twitter and Instagram who will say clearly—and have said to us before—that racist abuse is not allowed on their platforms? What would you say to them?
Lianne Sanderson: It obviously is allowed and I would encourage them to be able to take it down in the same way that if you put up music they can suspect there has been a copyright infringement and the same if you mention Covid. There is that thing that comes up that mentions Covid. If they have that in place for music and Covid, they can definitely have it in place. But it is a willingness to want to have it in place and they are not being pushed enough to have that.
I made it clear earlier that I believe you should have to give passports. I believe you should have to give identification and people should be accountable for their actions, as Anton said before. That is what I believe in. It is not a breach of privacy because every time you go on to a website, you have to accept the cookies and you have to accept all these different things anyway, and before you know it you have advertisements coming up on your computer. You should have to give the same as everybody else does.
Q199 Chair: If they tell us in the next evidence session, as they have told us in different evidence sessions in the past, that they have artificial intelligence that they use and they have lines that they draw on preventing racist abuse or taking down racist abuse, what would your message be to them?
Simone Pound: It is not enough. Whatever they are doing currently is not enough. If it was, we would not be having the issues that we have. We know that from an emoji perspective, over a third of abuse is in an emoji context. We talk about the impact. It is not just the impact on players and their families and wider society. We are creating a toxic culture that we need to address because it will impact everybody.
Q200 Chair: Simone, to clarify with you, you have this PFA report. In case anything is updated from it, the figures in that were that 44% of professional footballers have experienced discriminatory abuse. Is that right?
Simone Pound: That is 44% of the players whom we started with in our report. That is correct.
Q201 Chair: How much of the abuse that you identified and the abuse that you worked with Twitter to identify is still up?
Simone Pound: I would have to get back to you on that. Since we produced the most recent report, I hope that the majority is down now. However, I could look and get back to you on that.
Q202 Chair: That would be helpful, because you said in July that 44% of the racist posts aimed at Premier League players posted since September 2020 were still visible on publication of this research in July 2021.
Simone Pound: Yes, I can get back to you on that. The other key point on all of this is that it is not just the posts. We need to deal with the accounts and the account holders. As well as taking down the posts, we need to get to the people who are sending them. It is all well and good—although it is not—to take down the accounts. We need to find out who is posting.
Q203 Chair: What is your experience of their willingness to do that?
Simone Pound: As Anton said and you will see for yourself, they present and speak in a way that you would feel that they are committed and are working on this. However, they are not doing enough. They are multibillion-dollar companies with all of the technological resources at their disposal and they have not been able to come up with solutions. Football wrote an open letter asking for specific things—verification, being able to block content, identifying accounts—and these things are not happening. We want some answers and we need to see solutions.
Anton Ferdinand: Sorry, Chair, it boils down to this. They have the solution, it is there, they have it and they know they have it. They just do not want to implement it. The reason they do not want to implement it is monetary. If I retweet a racist tweet that has been put my way, the frenzy around that tweet is monetary to them. That is why they do not want it off their platform. Do they have the technology? Of course they have the technology. They can sit here and say they do not but of course they do because, like I explained to you, they have the technology for predictive text, they have the technology for other stuff, they have the technology to take down copyright and anything to do with Covid. Are they telling you it just does not work for racism? Of course they have the technology for that. It comes down to whether they want to. They do not. This is what I am saying. Their words say that they want to.
With Twitter especially—because I am in dialogue with Twitter—how many people at senior management level in these companies have an experience of being racially abused? That is massive. How many of them have an experience of being racially abused or any form of abuse? At the meetings that I have been involved in, all I hear is, “We will never understand. We will never know what it feels like”. But they are multibillion-dollar companies and they do not have somebody who understands it or people at senior management level who understand it and who can influence what is going on in that company.
It is massive. That goes across the board on everything. That is why I am happy to be in here speaking about this, using my own personal experience with the likes of Lianne, Marvin and Simone. It is fantastic that you guys have got us in here because, like I say, you will never experience what we experience but by talking to us you hopefully can understand what it feels like. Through understanding, that is when empathy comes, which makes you want to do better and makes you want to counteract it. But they do not have that or they might have it but we have never seen it or, if they do have it, obviously it is the wrong person who is in there because it is not a person who will challenge.
As a black man, I find myself always having to say to people, “I am not here to challenge your authority. I am here to challenge you to be better”. There is a difference in that. The fact is that I feel I need to say that everywhere I go. That is my living experience. You will never know that but from me saying it you will understand it. That is massive with everything. It has to be the right person, someone who is willing to do that. I do not want to badger the people who are in power at the moment, but when we are talking about racism and we are talking about football, we have the likes of Priti Patel coming out and half condoning the booing of taking the knee. There is a saying: things do not rock from the bottom up, they rock from the top down. The top of the top is Parliament. When you have somebody who is at the top saying something like that, it gives people the right to go and put their views out there because they feel that she said it and so can they. That is a massive problem.
Q204 Chair: Hopefully we have not just heard the words that you have spoken today ourselves but also in the way that the Committee is broadcast and giving a platform as well for other people to also hear the powerful words that you have said. We are hugely grateful to you for the leadership that you are showing and also the strength that you have shown in speaking out about all of this. We have seen the leadership from the England team as well in challenging racism. But you are also right that this is a huge challenge to the social media companies and to Parliament and to the Government as well. That is why some of the questions we are likely to pursue will be around the online harms Bill and the potential for further legislation in this area, as well as pursuing now the issues that you have raised with the social media companies.
I am conscious that we want to put some of these questions now to the social media companies. Do any of you have any further points that we have not allowed you to raise that we should be taking forward either directly with the social media companies or more broadly about racism in football?
Anton Ferdinand: Sorry, Chair, I have got two. Going back to what I said about things going from the top down and not from the bottom up, that is why I asked the question. If there was a solution and if football delivered a message of a solution to the social media companies, it is important that it is backed by all parties, regardless of whether there is somebody in the party who does not agree with it. It is important. If we are to make change, we need to be united against these guys. If we are not united—and I have seen it with my own eyes—and if we are separate, they can pick us off so quickly. But when we are united, that is when they find it hard to pick us off.
The online harms Bill is the same thing I said. When writing the online harms Bill, were there people who have experience of different types of abuse? Have they had input into this online harms Bill?
Secondly, if any of your parties were in power and the online harms Bill came into play—what the online harms Bill is trying to do is fantastic in hurting their pockets, but what if Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey or whoever it may be all of a sudden said to whichever party is in power at the time, “See that intel that you got from our platform about terrorism or about sex trafficking or whatever? Unless you bypass that fine that you are giving me, you will no longer get that intel”? What happens then? That is my only concern with the online harms Bill. What it is trying to do is fantastic, but from what I have seen and connecting the dots—and you might have a different view on this—there is the Government level and then there is another level. These guys are at that level above. That is my question: if they do put on pressure, how do you counteract that?
Q205 Chair: I am sorry to interrupt you. I am conscious that we have to put these questions to the next panel. These are exactly the questions that we ask. We are a cross-party Committee, so part of our role is to put these questions to the Government and to make sure that there is at least work towards a legislative framework that can address all of these things. I hope we can keep pressing to do that. We do need to move on. Were there any short final points from anybody if we did not cover them previously?
Lianne Sanderson: No. I want to say thank you for having us here today and allowing us to have a voice. It is not easy being those people sometimes. I mentioned before about being a trailblazer. Thank you again for listening to us and, hopefully, we can all impact change in this way.
Chair: Thank you. We have huge admiration for you and for the work you have all been doing and continue to do in this field as well. Thank you very much.
Witnesses: Tara Hopkins and Katy Minshall.
Q206 Chair: We will move on to our next panel now, which is to hear from Twitter and Instagram. Our first panel is welcome to stay and hear the evidence. We will be joined now by Tara Hopkins, the Director of Public Policy from Instagram and Katy Minshall, the Head of UK Public Policy for Twitter. Welcome to both of you. You will have heard the evidence from our previous panel and the powerful words that they put. Can you give us your response to it?
Tara Hopkins: Thank you for the opportunity to be part of this conversation today. No one should have to experience abuse and particularly we do not want to see this on Instagram. Honestly, thank you so much for sharing that lived experience. We have heard from Anton, Marvin, Lianne and Simone on the experience they have had on our platform, Instagram. As I said, we do not want to see this kind of abuse in society and we do not want to see it on Instagram.
We have—and we have long had—strong rules and policies against hate speech on the platform and against racism, bullying and harassment on our platform. I am looking forward to the conversation as we work through and I can talk to you about our approach, how we have approached this in the past, what we have done running up to and during the European Championships, the partnerships that we are working on, the tools that we have been able to build in the background, the tools that we are producing to help our users to have a better experience on our platform, and indeed to learn from these experiences and continue in that improvement.
Katy Minshall: Thank you again for having Twitter here today. There is no place for that kind of abuse on Twitter. My colleagues at Twitter and I go and work for the platform because it is intended to be a place where anyone can speak freely and safely. The witnesses have described the exact opposite. People are driven offline because they do not feel safe. I have heard directly from Simone, Anton and others who have experienced online racist abuse over the months and years that have gone by, as have others in the company, and we are acutely aware of the stakes at play.
Q207 Chair: The problem is there is such a gap between the warm words that you have said and what we have just heard. The players who are experiencing this abuse and the former professional players who are experiencing this abuse do not feel like they get proper support from social media platforms. When they report abuse it is not being taken down and you are not doing enough to remove these accounts. What do you have to say to them? They were clear in their evidence to us.
Katy Minshall: First, the burden should not be on victims of abuse to report those tweets to us. From working with the football community over the past few years, we have got to a place where, by the end of last season, we were taking down about 95% of the abusive tweets. We were detecting them using machine learning. Beyond that, we have partnerships in place with the clubs, the FA, the Premier League and others so that if anyone does not get detected by our machine learning, they are able to report it directly to our enforcement teams and we can take it down quickly. But our overarching approach is such that the burden does not fall on the victim.
For too long one of the problems has been looking at these issues solely through the lens of content moderation and how we can quickly find and remove these abusive tweets, rather than looking at the fundamentals of platforms like Twitter in the first place. How can we stop it being possible for the tweet from person A to be sent to person B or be seen by person B? I am sure we will get into that in this session, but Marvin hit the nail on the head when he said that the challenge is the ease with which people can contact footballers. That is where we are starting to focus a lot of our work.
Q208 Chair: On the Instagram situation, particularly with the three England players who were most targeted for abuse earlier in the year, I wrote to you from the Committee raising real concern about clearly racist posts and responses that were up for days and days and were not being taken down. Can I clarify your community standards and what you regard as racist? When you have the monkey and chimpanzee emojis being used to bombard black England players with comments and posts, do you accept that that is racist?
Tara Hopkins: If emojis are being used to racially abuse anyone, including any footballer, it absolutely breaks our policies 100% and will be removed. In the spike that we saw immediately following the European Championships, we were able to remove 15,000 comments that appeared on Instagram over the period of 11 to 13 July. Over 70% of those comments were removed within one hour and 90% were removed within 24 hours. The majority of that was indeed proactively detected and removed.
Of course, there were errors and I am happy to go into some of those. A lot of this content can be highly contextual. An emoji can be used in a completely benign way and that does not break our policies. An emoji, when it is being used to racially abuse someone, absolutely breaks our policies. The machine learning is mixed with human review. On the evening of the European Championship itself, there was a large spike in the number of comments and in the activity. We had to work through the comments and make sure that we were getting it right. Some of them had to go to human review to do that. But we had to take into account the nuance and complexity of that in the hours after that European Championship final.
Q209 Chair: I want to clarify the way you are interpreting context in this. If you see some of those awful comments, which were clearly a series of gorilla emojis being posted on the profile of Bukayo Saka, I would say they were clearly racist. Would you?
Tara Hopkins: It was clearly racist and absolutely broke our policies 100%. We have both the artificial intelligence and the human review that have to be brought together to better understand that. We have learned and we have made changes following what happened at the European final. We have been able to look at the strings of emojis that might be brought together to racially abuse. We have been able to assess, when we see a certain number of emojis being brought together, that they are predominantly being used to abuse. We have been able to learn from that experience. Certain strings of emojis—I will not go into which they are because this can be an adversarial space—are put into our offensive comment filter technology, so they will be found and removed from the system.
Q210 Chair: Why are they still up today?
Tara Hopkins: They should not be up. If things are there and you see them, please continue to report them to us. Our systems are in place. We have had a significant increase in being able to proactively detect and remove this kind of content. In our last transparency report, 95% of this kind of bullying, harassment and hate speech content is proactively identified and removed. That is up from 47% last time.
Q211 Chair: There clearly is some still up today and I want to come back to that. But let me clarify another thing. If you have the N-word but spelled with G-A at the end rather than G-E-R, I presume you would also agree that that is appalling racism and should be removed?
Tara Hopkins: A slur being used to racially abuse is absolutely against our policies.
Q212 Chair: Is that being taken down?
Tara Hopkins: That would be taken down. That would be removed from our platform. Again, as I said, we are looking at sometimes understanding the context. It sounds from that particular context that it is absolutely violating and will come down.
The context is different or harder, I suppose, for machine learning and it needs then human review when a slur is being used in reclaimed speech, which can sometimes be the case, versus being used in an abusive way. That is where our machine is learning and the way it learns is by understanding violating and non-violating content and being able to feed into the machine learning to improve on that. That is absolutely what we are doing. We are constantly trying to improve the processes.
Q213 Chair: I hear these words and I have a huge reality gap because I have in front of me screenshots from Bukayo Saka, Jadon Sancho and Marcus Rashford’s profile pages that we took yesterday. From two minutes of scrolling and from just looking at them for a couple of seconds, I have on Bukayo Saka’s the use of the N-word and a whole series of monkey or gorilla emojis. It is similar on Jadon Sancho’s one with the N-word on its own. That is just the insult and the slur being thrown at someone. Again, on Marcus Rashford’s, there is one referring to a chimpanzee. I will send you these across in an e-mail. If you have your e-mail open, you can look at them in the course of this evidence session.
But I have to say that I assumed, when we had raised this with you, when we had challenged you on it, when you had been so widely challenged at the time, that you would now have a system in place that would deal with these. But these posts are from five, six and seven weeks ago. These have been up there for week after week after week. If any child following a footballer flicks on this and scrolls through the comments, they will see this kind of clearly racist abuse. Everything you have said to me looks like utter garbage compared to seeing these posts on the screen right now.
Tara Hopkins: I am sorry that those posts are still up. From the sounds of it, they are clearly violating our policies and they should be removed. As I said, our machine learning and our detection of this kind of content is improving with time. Over the course of those two particular days after the final, we were able to remove 15,000 pieces of content, of which 90% was removed within a 24-hour period. But that shows that there is still room for improvement and we are conscious of that. With these types of incidents and the use of these types of emojis, as I say, we are constantly learning and our improving our systems, teaching the machine—
Q214 Chair: How much do you have to learn about the N-word? Why does your AI not pick that up?
Tara Hopkins: If it is being used in a slur and in a racially abusive way, that is absolutely—
Q215 Chair: It is the word on its own. In one of the posts, it is on its own. In fact, there are a few like that with just the word on its own. That looks clearly to me like a racist slur. What possible context would justify it?
Tara Hopkins: It is a racist slur and is against our policies. I will immediately look at that and how we can—
Q216 Ms Abbott: Tara, you said that if the word “nigger” is being used in a racially abusive way, it is wrong. In what way can you use the word “nigger” and it not be racially abusive?
Tara Hopkins: As I understand it, a slur that is being used by an individual as reclaimed speech or if someone is drawing attention to racism that they have been subjected to, it is them trying to express that. It is important that Instagram is also a place where people come to draw attention to the racism that unfortunately they have experienced, whether it is on our platform or in other parts of their lives. We have to be careful that we allow for that voice to be able to say that they have been experiencing this and we have to be careful that we do not remove someone who is trying to campaign and draw attention versus someone who, as it sounds like in this case, is clearly racially abusing someone. That is against our policies.
Q217 Chair: Having searched through, the problem is that you are using that as an excuse and an argument against taking swift action against clear racist abuse. I am still simply baffled as to how one of the richest companies on the planet and one of the most technically sophisticated companies on the planet, which uses AI in such complex ways, is incapable of identifying basic emojis and basic racist slurs just by putting them into your AI. I simply do not understand it.
Tara Hopkins: I appreciate that. We have seen in our assessment and our analysis that globally many emojis are not used in a racially motivated or abusive way. When we look at our policies around how we deal with emojis when they are being used in an abusive way, it has to be different to how we deal with emojis when they are not being used in an abusive way.
I completely appreciate that we have to learn and we will improve on this. As I said, we have learned already and have built new technology and have improved the technology when it comes to the strings of emojis that we have seen were used over the course of the European Championships to most likely be racially abusive. That is now being fed into our machine learning and we are definitely seeing improvements already in that. As I said, we know we have room for improvement and we absolutely are committed to doing so.
Chair: But you also heard the scale of the impact that this kind of abuse has on people, the impact on people’s mental health and the impact on people’s lives, and that is why your response of, “We are working on it. We are getting better”, with such blatant examples where you are clearly failing to do so, sounds so lame.
Q218 Stuart C McDonald: On the scope of what your community rules allow and do not allow, if I posted either of the following on your platforms in a few minutes’ time, would it be within your rules or not? If I posted, “No blacks in England team. Keep our team white”, or if I posted, “Player X isn’t English. Blacks can’t be English”, would that be within the scope of your rules?
Tara Hopkins: The context from the sounds of both of those is that they are racially abusive and they go against our hate speech, bullying, harassment and racism policies. I would have to see the full context. Our machine learning tries to look at the image that you might have posted with that or if it is a comment on its own in someone else’s feed. There are a number of signals that we look at to ascertain whether that is violating or non-violating.
Q219 Stuart C McDonald: That seems an extraordinarily equivocal response. This is clearly racist.
Tara Hopkins: As I said at the beginning, what you have said sounds clearly like it is racist and it would be removed. But there are contexts when someone is posting or adding something to the bottom of a post. I will give an example. If someone says, “Congratulations”, on the bottom of a post because someone has had a baby, it is a benign and a positive post. If someone says, “Congratulations”, when someone is announcing a loved one has passed away, that is potentially bullying and harassment and we would remove that for bullying and harassment.
The context and understanding on Instagram, whether it is a story, whether someone is trying to draw attention to something or whether it is, as this sounds like, purely abusive, it would be removed.
Q220 Stuart C McDonald: The problem seems to be that you are far more worried about taking down something that is benign than you are about leaving up something that is clearly racist. Is that the problem?
Tara Hopkins: I do not want to give that impression at all. We have strong rules around hate speech, bullying, harassment and racism. Absolutely, when someone breaks our rules, we remove that content and we take action against that person and that individual account.
I want to draw attention to the fact that our platform is predominantly used in an incredibly positive way. Indeed, during the European Championships and in the days following the final, the England players received hundreds of thousands of positive comments and millions of likes on their Instagram accounts. Of course we have strong policies around this and we absolutely want to action it and get this right and improve when we have made mistakes, but I want to draw attention to the fact that sometimes and oftentimes our platform is being used to draw attention to this, to positively campaign and to build community.
Q221 Stuart C McDonald: Twitter, would those tweets be allowed?
Katy Minshall: We have rules against inciting fear about members of protected groups. It certainly sounds like they would break the rules. As Tara said, I will take them away and find out from our policy enforcement team—
Q222 Stuart C McDonald: But the reason I asked about those particular posts was that Sunder Katwala, who is chair of a respected think tank, reported tweets like that to Twitter and Twitter said that those tweets were not against the current rules at all. Why are those tweets not in breach of Twitter’s current rules?
Katy Minshall: As I said, they certainly sound abusive to me, so I will have to take that away, find out what happened and come back to you.
Q223 Chair: What do we do? You are clearly saying that those are in violation of the rules. They certainly sound like they should be to us. They are clearly racist. But someone who has complained about them has been told that they are not. Seriously, Twitter, what do we do about this? You are saying one thing when you are sitting in front of us giving evidence, but the way your system is working and the way your company is working means that they are not being taken down and Sunder is being told that they are not racist.
Katy Minshall: We have to think far more about the mechanisms where it is possible to send such tweets in the first place or have it be possible for a tweet to be seen by someone who is being targeted. At the moment, we are trialling, for example, the ability, if you so choose, for Twitter to autoblock accounts trying to interact with you in a harmful or abusive way. For too long there has been a burden on those who are confronted with abuse and a burden on users writ large to report these issues to us. The reality is, even if we get to an abusive tweet quickly, the harm may have already been caused because Person A has sent a tweet to Person B and Person B has seen it. We have to do far more to prevent it being possible for that to happen with such ease.
Chair: You are answering a different question.
Katy Minshall: Sorry, could you repeat your first question?
Chair: The question that is being put to you and that Stuart McDonald has put to you is that there have been things that say, “No blacks in the England team. Keep our team white”, which seems blatantly racist to me, to Stuart and to Sunder, who complained about it. You have responded and said, “Yes, that does sound like that would violate our rules”. However, Twitter formally and officially has told Sunder when he complained about them that those do not violate the current rules. Do they or do they not violate the current rules?
Katy Minshall: As I said, it sounds like they break the rules to me, but I would have to go away and look at the tweets and come back to you.
There is not an excuse for when someone has reported something and it breaks our rules and we have not taken it down or we have not acted appropriately. I can talk about what we are trying to do to address that, but the key thing is transparency and clarity. Again, not just on Twitter but across the industry more broadly, for too long people have not had sufficient information given to them by the platforms themselves about what they should expect when they make a report. That transparency and—
Q224 Chair: But this is not even about that. We have a huge difference in judgment. If those are the kinds of things that Twitter is saying are okay, it is little wonder that the former professional footballers we heard from are so despairing that they are not seeing racism removed and that they are having to experience it so much because Twitter is clearly not removing racist posts.
Katy Minshall: Over the past few years to try to address this, when our content moderators join the company they undertake a five-week training programme that is focused on the experience of different groups online, on safety issues and on the abuse different people experience. During their training and their tenure, in the assessments they undertake we are looking for not just the impartial and consistent enforcement of our rules but also the ability to reflect current events, the changing nature of abuse and new facts of abuse, taking into account local context and cultural nuance as well. That work starts further back when talking to members of our trust and safety council and those who have directly experienced online racist abuse or online abuse more broadly and hearing from them the sorts of ways that they have been targeted and feeding that back into our policy and into our content moderator training as well.
Q225 Stuart C McDonald: Cutting to the chase here, there are all sorts of equivocations and caveats and we keep hearing about context. There is repeated reference to abuse, abusive tweets and all the rest. But ultimately is it in your rules that racist tweets should be taken down from your platforms? It seems to me that that is not the case and that both of your platforms allow for racist tweets. There are other rules that might push them over the edge, but if a tweet or a post is racist, is that the end of the matter and it should not be on your platform? Is that what your rules say?
Katy Minshall: Yes, if a tweet is sending racist abuse, it is against our rules and will be taken down.
Q226 Stuart C McDonald: You keep putting in the word “abuse”, but what do you mean by abuse? Does it have to be targeted at somebody? Why do we keep hearing that? If something is racist, is that it, end of story, and it should not be on your platform? Is that what you are saying?
Katy Minshall: On our website are our rules against hateful conduct. You cannot send a tweet that incites harassment against a group of people. You cannot send a tweet that incites fear about a group of people or other categories of ways we have seen people be racist and abusive on Twitter in the past. The complexity and the challenge of it is exactly what Tara has outlined. When it comes to machine learning and detection, we are always trying to make sure we do not inadvertently take down tweets or content when it is important that it is online because it is someone documenting their experience of racism. That is why some of the time you see that something slips through the net of our machine learning and is still on Twitter or still on another platform.
Q227 Ms Abbott: In response to what Tara said and to repeat what I said, there is no context in which the word “nigger” is not racially abusive. If you do not know that, it is no wonder there is a problem with much of the content on Instagram. Katy said that there is no place for racist abuse on Twitter. That is clearly nonsense. I know a tiny bit about racist abuse on Twitter because I get more abuse on Twitter than all the other women MPs put together. Daily, hourly, there is racist abuse on Twitter. How can you possibly say that?
Katy Minshall: The experience you and other people in public life have had is horrible to see. We are aware of the impact that that has on people thinking of running for election or standing up in public life. As I said before, the problem we have had not just at Twitter but across the industry more broadly is thinking for too long about how quickly we can find and remove the tweets that you are getting. A lot more work now is going into how we can stop those tweets being sent in the first place. We have been experimenting. When someone tries to send a tweet that looks like it is abusive, a message pops up saying, “It looks like this might cause harm. Are you sure you want to send it?” A third of people do not then send that tweet. That is one of a number of interventions that will be necessary to try to prevent the experience that you and others who are Members of Parliament continue to have.
Q228 Ms Abbott: I am interested in what you are saying. I have to tell you that those of us who are at the receiving end of racist abuse on Twitter and other platforms want to know how quickly it can be taken down.
Let me move to the question of anonymity. As our professional footballers said, for some of us it is a key issue. I understand why somebody who has an account and is on Twitter would not want their name and details made public, but why can a platform like Twitter not hold in its records the genuine identity and genuine contact details of the people posting stuff on Twitter? In my experience, the anonymity frees people to use words like “nigger” and to put that racist abuse online. Why will you not insist that people who have Twitter accounts let you know what their real identity is and how they can be contacted, not putting it online because I understand that might endanger some people, but why are you defending anonymity?
Katy Minshall: You cannot be anonymous on Twitter. You can be pseudonymous. If you sign up for a Twitter account, we ask for your full name, your date of birth and your e-mail address or phone number, one of which you have to verify to get on to the service. Thinking about the Euros, the most recent update I saw was from the beginning of August, when the police had arrested 11 people for sending online racist abuse. Whether you are @katyminshall or @pseudonym123, it is no shield from our rules or from criminal liability.
To the question you asked about why we do not, for example, require a government ID to come on to our service, it is a complicated answer. On the one hand, millions of people in the UK do not have a driver’s licence or passport. They are from exactly the communities that you would want to see online on a place like Twitter.
Another challenge is more technical. Parliament is looking at the Online Safety Bill. If you mandate it for the UK, how do you guard against people using VPNs to pretend they are in other parts of the world? If you mandate it for the entire world, what about all the countries where people do not have those sorts of documentations?
We do think very much about the relationship between identity and safety and to make sure of course we have systems in place with the police, but they are some of the complexities around why we do not ask for something like a government ID.
Q229 Ms Abbott: My experience is that when I have reported some of this abuse to the police—because some of this abuse if you said it in any other context would be illegal—the police say that they cannot trace the person who has put the abuse online. You say nobody is anonymous on Twitter, but certainly the police find it difficult to trace people. That is why it goes unpunished and that is why people feel they can get away with it. What will Twitter do about that?
Katy Minshall: We looked at the accounts we suspended over the course of the Euros and we saw that 99% of them were identifiable. The police can request data about any account at any time using a specific portal for law enforcement all over the world. I and other colleagues have regular meetings with teams like the football policing unit so that they are able to quickly send through requests in line with the investigations they are pursuing.
Q230 Ms Abbott: I am watching the time, but are you saying that every account on Twitter is identifiable?
Katy Minshall: I am saying that when it came to the Euros, 99% were identifiable. I do not have statistics to hand for accounts writ large. I can certainly look into that. But it highlights the need to be cautious about the idea that providing more information would end online abuse. I can say from the tweets that come across my desk every day that there are plenty of people, unfortunately, who will send abuse and hateful tweets and who are quite happy to use their full name in their Twitter account or will have all sorts of personal information in their biography.
Q231 Ms Abbott: I understand that, but it is common sense that fewer people would engage in racist abuse if they did not feel they had the shield of anonymity.
To go back to the Euros, which the Chair raised, as soon as I saw those black players miss that penalty, I knew they would get a torrent of racist abuse on Twitter. Did Twitter see that? Did Twitter take any action at that point?
Katy Minshall: Yes, absolutely, we did. We have been working with the football authorities for years on this issue and we had a specific plan in place for the Euros. On the night of the final, our systems kicked in immediately and we took down 1,622 abusive tweets during the final and in the 24 hours that followed. By the Wednesday—bearing in mind the final was on the Sunday—that figure had grown to 1,961 as people continued to try to send these tweets. To put that in context, looking at the tournament as a whole, we took down 10,934 tweets using our machine learning and a further 667 reports from partners. There was a large spike during the final and, while for a long time we have been aware of the issue and working on it, we were all shocked by the volume of people who were sending these posts online.
Q232 Ms Abbott: To talk about that, the evidence that we have had from the professional footballers and the PFA is that all too often you do not take down accounts. When I asked our earlier witnesses why that is, they said I should ask you. Tell me. Why is it, when at least some accounts are reported to you as clearly racist, you do not take them down?
Katy Minshall: We do take down accounts. In fact, ahead of this hearing—
Q233 Ms Abbott: You say that, so why have people just given evidence to this parliamentary Committee making it clear that one of their concerns is that you are not taking accounts down when they are reported to you?
Katy Minshall: Permanent suspension is our strongest enforcement option. This Committee shared three tweets with us in advance. All three of those accounts were permanently suspended. Last year we suspended 2 million accounts, about 700,000 of which were for abuse and hateful conduct. We also have to consider something that people often say about the police: you cannot arrest your way out of a problem. It is the same here. You cannot ban your way out of the problem. Thinking about abuse writ large, we find that temporary suspensions work. The majority of people who are given a temporary suspension do not go on to break the rules again. It is important for platforms to take responsibility for improving behaviours as well on their own service and also to suspend accounts as required when they are behaving in an egregious way.
Ms Abbott: Finally, I put it to you that if you are the person going on your phone, hourly sometimes, and seeing appalling racist abuse, what matters to you is not what you can do in the medium term to modify the behaviour. What matters to you is what Twitter is doing in the here and now to take down the account. You cannot answer that and so I will hand back to the Chair.
Q234 Simon Fell: Ms Minshall, to follow up on a couple of Diane Abbott’s points, your blog post on 10 August has already been cited as saying that 99% of the accounts you identified following the Euros were not anonymous. What qualifies as an anonymous account, given the data you say you collect on individuals?
Katy Minshall: Of the accounts, 99% were identifiable. That means they had provided at least one and in most cases two pieces of personal identification. For example, if the police got in touch with us about that account, they would be able to pursue and identify them.
Q235 Simon Fell: In that case, how can someone evade that system to join Twitter without providing the requisite information?
Katy Minshall: When you go to sign up to a Twitter account today, you are asked for your full name, your date of birth and your e-mail address or phone number, which you have to verify to get on to Twitter. When someone is on the service, they may share with us further information that could be useful for a criminal investigation.
Q236 Simon Fell: Okay, but you have this 1% that you have identified about whom you do not have that information and you could not then share that information with the police, presumably. How do they find themselves in a position where they have managed to access your platform and post racist content and you do not have the information you need to pass that on to law enforcement?
Katy Minshall: I would like to give you a definitive answer, so I will go away and come back to you. But my understanding is that the 1% would probably reflect historic accounts where they were able to set up the accounts before the measures we have in place today existed. But please, if you allow me, I will confirm that and come back to you.
Q237 Simon Fell: Thank you. My next question is about how you track multiple account ownership. Some of these individuals will set up multiple accounts. They will post abuse. Maybe they will just drop an account and start up another one. What is your process for tracking across that and making sure that an individual does not essentially shed their skin and move on and do this somewhere else?
Katy Minshall: Someone can have multiple Twitter accounts. That is not against the rules. You could have one for representing an organisation you run and you could have a personal one as well. You do break the rules if you are using multiple accounts to cause harm on Twitter. That might be to spam or to retweet each account’s content. As well, if you have been suspended from Twitter, you are not allowed to come back on again. We have tools in place that are constantly looking for these sorts of accounts on the platform and will identify and suspend them.
This is also a challenge across the industry. If there is a determined bad actor who really wants to get back on to the platform, there is a limit to how technically you can spot them and you are more into the territory of looking for more complex signals like their behaviour being similar to someone you have suspended before. This issue needs addressing, but that gives you a sense of some of the complexity in trying to identify those accounts.
Q238 Simon Fell: Thank you. The same question to you, please, Tara.
Tara Hopkins: We also have a policy if someone has numerous Instagram accounts, which is normal. Particularly our younger audiences or our younger demographic may have several accounts but we know those accounts on the back end are connected to each other. We have a recidivism policy. If someone’s account is disabled from Instagram and they try to set up another account, we are able to find that under our recidivism policy. That breaks our policies and we will also be able to block them.
Quite recently we have provided people with a new tool where they can block an account and they can also block any new account that is created by that same person. While it is not exactly the same thing, it is an example of where we are building tools to enable people to improve their experience. We do not want people to be contacted by someone whom they have blocked who then might try to set up another account and get back in touch with them.
Q239 Simon Fell: If you identify an individual on Instagram who has two accounts and on the first account they post hateful or racist content and are suspended, what happens to their second account? Does that stay open?
Tara Hopkins: No, the account would also come down. I should be clear about this. If the account is set up to abuse, that account will then also come down. To be clear, if an account is set up purely for the purposes of abusing, bullying or harassing, that account violates and it would also come down.
Q240 Simon Fell: Thank you. One last question, because I am conscious of time. We have heard in the previous session certainly compelling evidence from professional footballers that they think one of the solutions to this—and I have to say I am sympathetic to it—is providing some form of ID verification on the way into your platforms. We have heard Twitter’s view on this, but what is Facebook and Instagram’s view?
Tara Hopkins: As Katy said, it is a broad industry challenge. We all share the same goal, which is holding people to account. To be clear, we are able to hold people to account on Instagram.
We have a dedicated law enforcement outreach team, who well before, in the run-up to, during and immediately post the European Championships have been working with the South Yorkshire Police and the Home Office policing unit to deal constructively and helpfully with any requests coming from the police related to online abuse.
As Katy said, there are some complexities around this. I know I keep using that word, but we know that the Electoral Commission has said that there are 3.5 million people in the UK alone who do not have suitable photo ID. Members of those groups are often from disadvantaged backgrounds. We are conscious on Instagram that we are a platform for a younger demographic, often late teenagers and people in their early 20s, and a lot of late teenagers do not have access to any kind of ID. We want to keep the platform open to all and be as inclusive as we possibly can be and also to meet the goal of being accountable when we need to be accountable. We have that data and we are able to share it with the police in an appropriate way.
Q241 Chair: I have a follow-up to go back to some of the points that we have covered. Katy, have all of the cases that the PFA raised with Twitter in its report now been dealt with? Have all of the racist tweets that it identified now been removed?
Katy Minshall: The data shared with us by Signify was reviewed. I am afraid I do not have the exact number to hand but we did take down hundreds of tweets. My understanding is that a number of those were historic tweets that predate the machine learning and proactive enforcement we have put in place, but we have also reviewed if there is something we are missing and we have made amendments accordingly.
It is important to acknowledge that the reason that report is possible is Twitter makes its data publicly available. Tens of thousands of researchers have accessed Twitter data over the past decade and, frankly, we are all the better for it because of that transparency and because the online harms we see on Twitter are clearly documented.
I do not know if we will have time to go into the Online Safety Bill, but it is a shame that transparency appears to be limited to just annual reports. There is hopefully more to do to create that kind of transparency across the industry.
Q242 Chair: What additional transparency would you include?
Katy Minshall: It would be great to see more expectations on how social media services are working with the research community. We have a specific programme of work with researchers. Part of the drive for the Online Safety Bill is that you are having to take my word for something and that is not sustainable. You want independent experts to be able to access data on social media services, in line with privacy standards as you would expect where possible, and be able to not only assess the performance of different services but also contribute to the solutions. That has certainly been our experience. By being transparent, it is not just Twitter making these calls, but it is far more straightforward to bring independent experts into those conversations and think about suitable solutions.
Q243 Chair: For any of the PFA-identified tweets that you for whatever reason did not take down, have you given the PFA an explanation of why you thought those tweets were not appropriate to take down, if there were any?
Katy Minshall: I am afraid I will have to check.
Q244 Chair: That would be helpful to know because we are quite keen to get to the bottom of why things were still not working. Tara, I have sent you over some of the examples of things, the N-word, the racist emojis and so on, that we checked are still up on the England players’ profile pages this morning weeks after they were posted. Do you have any further explanation as to why those might still be up there?
Tara Hopkins: No. Looking at these—and it was brief because I have not had my e-mail open for long while concentrating on this—they look like they absolutely violate our policy and we will take them away and deal with them as quickly as we possibly can. Thank you for bringing them to our attention. I am deeply sorry that you have been able to find those. That is not our intention. We are always trying to get as close to zero as we possibly can, but when there are instances of racism unfortunately in our broader society, in football and on our platform, we will not always be able to get to zero. We will absolutely look at them as quickly as we can and get back to you. It looks like they are all absolutely breaking our rules and we will come down quickly on them.
Q245 Chair: In that case, my question is why on earth have they not been picked up already? They are so blatant and so obvious and it would seem like they are the most obvious things that any AI, especially designed by a company that is as sophisticated as yours, would be able to pick up. “Thank you for bringing it to our attention.” We as Committee members will not be spending every Tuesday afternoon scrolling through and looking for things to report to you. More importantly, those who experience the abuse should not be having to spend huge amounts of time scrolling through all the comments on their profiles to report them to you. I still do not understand and I was hoping if you had a final look at these you might be able to give us some clue as to why such basic and blatantly racist posts were not picked up.
Tara Hopkins: I have not gone into them in detail because I have been following the conversation, so we will come back to you on it. I know it is a frustration maybe when I say it, but we are learning from this experience. I talked about what we have done with the strings of emojis and understanding how they are brought together to predominantly abuse. We have now taken action on that. We have built that into our machine learning and into our system. Those types of strings of emojis when brought together will be removed before they are posted and will be proactively detected. We are constantly improving this system. From what happened recently, we are learning and we will continue to get better and the machine learning will improve. As I said, I will come back to the Committee on it.
Q246 Chair: That is so hard to believe when there are so many strings of emojis still up and also clearly racist words up as well. That is what makes this so hard. The problem is—and you will have listened to the testimony from the professional footballers earlier and you will have listened not just to them but to so many people who have experienced racist abuse—that they do not think you are putting enough effort into it. Sure, you are doing more now than you were 12 months ago or certainly than you were three years ago, but they are still experiencing so much abuse. I want to put to you the words that Anton Ferdinand said, “Does it have to take a professional footballer to take their own life for you to do something about it?” That is the scale of his concern about your failure to act. What is your response to that?
Tara Hopkins: Absolutely. I heard his entire testimony and it was incredibly heartfelt. Being able to hear that lived experience that he has had was incredibly important. We are in discussion with and working in partnership with athletes themselves and with the football industry and we have been for many months and indeed years. We have a dedicated sports partnerships team, which works directly with athletes and speaks directly to athletes, their agencies and the people around them. We are looking at how we can build systems in the background and I keep talking about the AI and the machine learning and our policies to make sure they are in the right place.
Also important is building the right tools that resonate for athletes and footballers. An example of that would be when we built last year and announced reachability controls on direct messages on Instagram. The feedback we had from athletes and footballers was that they do not necessarily want to limit the reachability. They value being able to communicate with hundreds of thousands of their fans on Instagram. One of the values of Instagram to them is they want to be able to have that direct and personal experience.
However, we then went away and thought, “What can we build that does address some of those concerns when they are getting this kind of abuse in the direct messages?” We built a new tool called hidden words in collaboration and in consultation with Kick It Out and other football organisations. I want to make the point that we are constantly speaking to those who are involved in this to try to improve the experience they have on our platforms.
Q247 Chair: Yes. We are running out of time. Unfortunately the problem with hidden words is that you are asking the players themselves or the victims of abuse to go through and list all the possible racist words that might be thrown at them and all of the possible comments.
Tara Hopkins: Not at all. Sorry, I should explain. No, we build the list, working with anti-hate speech organisations and also with football organisations. We talked about the context. Lianne or Anton talked about this earlier on and the word “kitchen”. It is a completely benign word in most circumstances. If someone is being told to go back to the kitchen or go back to their ironing, that is an abusive word. We have compiled a list of hidden words, which anyone on Instagram can now turn on. We have also offered to work with footballers and to do that on their behalf. We cannot do it for privacy reasons but we have offered to go to them at their training grounds and to help them understand how some of these tools work. It is not the answer, but it is a step in the right direction.
Q248 Chair: Apologies for interrupting you, but we are about out of time. Quickly, how many people do you have in senior posts who are designing this AI and making decisions about it who have themselves experienced racist abuse?
Tara Hopkins: On Instagram we have a diverse workforce, whether that is our engineers who are working across the globe or our content moderation and our teams here working out of Dublin. We have over 100 nationalities working out of Dublin.
Q249 Chair: Perhaps you could write to us and give us some precise figures on that. Twitter, if you could do the same and tell us about your experience in senior positions it would be helpful to know.
Katy Minshall: Yes.
Q250 Ms Abbott: Quickly, on the diversity of your workforce, particularly the senior workforce, as well as telling us the nationality of the people, could you tell us whether they are black, BAME or not? That is the point people were making.
I wanted to get back to the question of anonymity. Those of us on the receiving end of racist abuse believe that anonymity is part of the problem. But Katy was arguing that only a tiny fraction of Twitter accounts are not verifiable. Katy, could you send the Committee a breakdown? How many Twitter accounts are historic accounts, as you describe it, that are anonymous and not verifiable? It would be interesting to know. You are saying it is a tiny fraction and so it would be good to have the figures from you. Katy, are you able to do that?
Katy Minshall: Yes, I can certainly look into that. To caveat my answer earlier, that was me hazarding a guess. That might not explain the 1%. Let me come back to you with a definitive answer.
On the diversity point, this has been a problem for the industry. We publish quarterly the breakdown of Twitter staff in gender and race. The entire industry needs to step up and ensure it is representative and reflective of the entire global conversation and community online.
Chair: Thank you very much for your evidence. It would be helpful if Twitter could follow up and let us know the response to the cases that the PFA raised with you. Could you also tell us about the cases that Sunder Katwala has raised with you? We have raised them directly but we may follow up with some further ones. He has been told that they do not violate Twitter’s standards. We would like an explanation of why they do not.
For Instagram, it would be helpful to have an explanation of why those cases on the footballers’ profiles continue to be there and why the AI system is not still picking up some of those clearly racist words and emojis. If you look on those players’ profiles even as a starting point, you will find considerably more than the ones we have sent through to you as well. A response on that would be helpful.
Thank you very much for your time. Sorry we have had to cut some of your answers short given the time that we have. Thank you for your time today. We will continue to pursue this. Thank you.