Euro 2020: Why is it so hard to track down racist trolls and remove hate messages from social media? | UK News

Sky News analyzed 99 accounts implicated in racist abuse against England players Bukayo Saka, Jadon Sancho and Marcus Rashford on social media.

The accounts, which were identified by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) campaign group, were behind more than 100 racist comments on players’ Instagram posts.

106 accounts were reported to the social media platform by the CCDH, but three days later only seven were deleted.

This despite comments violating Instagram community guidelines.

We found that only three of the accounts still active appeared to be UK-based, with one apparently managed by someone of primary school age.

More than a quarter of the comments were sent from anonymous private accounts without their own publication.

But identifying the perpetrators of hate online is only part of the problem.

Ensuring hateful content is removed from platforms presents its own unique challenges, according to Professor Matthew Williams, author of The science of hate, and professor at HateLab, Cardiff University

And activists say the government must work with social media companies on both issues to stop platforms from “giving racism, abuse and hate a megaphone.”

One of the first things we wanted to establish was which of the affected accounts were managed by people in the UK.

Even that is difficult. It is difficult to know if a user is who they say they are.

It is impossible to discover through open source techniques that an account is operated from a particular country.

There are, however, a few clues that can help.

A native English speaker, for example, might structure sentences in a …