According to ethical data science firm Signify, the “majority” of social media accounts responsible for directing racist abuse at Edwin Edogbo after his international debut are located in Ireland.
Edogbo, 23, faced a surge of racial abuse online after appearing as a substitute against Italy in the Six Nations last month, reports RTE.
The IRFU has confirmed it will lodge an official complaint with the gardaí in the coming days concerning three social media accounts connected to the abuse.
The IRFU worked with Signify to examine the incident. The company’s co-founder Jonathan Sebire told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland: “There was a spike of abuse (aimed at Edogbo) that was primarily racist in nature, reports RTE.
“And within that, it covered the gamut of what we might look for, which is explicitly racist, very serious abuse, all the way down into kind of grey areas that go below and into debate about the nature of Irishness, which is something that’s happening in a lot of countries at the moment.
“But the serious abuse and the explicitly racist abuse, we would then we would look at that. We report it to the platforms for action, and we would then investigate the accounts that had sent that to see where it’s coming from and who it might be coming from, and then if they have a relationship to the client.
“In this case, there was the majority was actually coming from Irish accounts or from fans of the rugby team. There were actually quite a few based in the United States from the expat community, but there was a significant amount that was kind of homegrown and coming from accounts based in Ireland,”, reports RTE.
When asked why social media platforms are not more actively tracking and moderating the origins of such comments, Sebire said: “I think the answer is that they do. It’s just that the nature of the conversation often exceeds what they’re actually looking for, reports RTE.
“When you’re dealing with someone like the IRFU, players are multi-platform and sometimes abuse and or threat can cross across multiple platforms. Any individual platform can only look after their own domain. So companies like ours are there to give kind of a holistic view of what’s actually going on.
“Also it may be appropriate for the platforms to take action, but sometimes it’s more serious or sometimes it’s something that the IRFU or other clients might want to action that the platforms wouldn’t want to do themselves,”, reports RTE.
In a statement on Tuesday, the IRFU said: “If any accounts are found to have links to rugby club members, we will not hesitate to take action. There is no place for anyone in a rugby club who behaves in this manner,”, reports RTE.
Sebire noted that some of the accounts involved in the abuse of Edogbo “appear to be fans”, adding: “If we identify that somebody is a season ticket holder for a club or is regularly purchasing tickets and coming to fixtures, it may be the case that they’re subject to banning orders from that or they’re stopped from having that kind of access because of the behaviour they’ve engaged.
“We’ve handed a number of cases over to the IRFU, and I think they are taking they’ve made a statement saying that they’re taking three of those forward and are going to report those. And it is the case that some of those did appear to be fans. I believe they’re considering what the next steps might be in relation to that,”, reports RTE.
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