Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook recorded numerous racially abusive posts and comments after England was served a defeat by Italy in the Euro 2020 finals on Sunday after a close-edged round of penalty shootouts. The management said on Monday that they were working to remove any such posts from the platforms.

Most of the hateful and racially pivoted posts were directed towards the players who could not score a goal for their team in the crucial round of penalties, which decided the outcome of the European championship. The players included Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho.

A spokesperson for Twitter said on Monday that such posts had no place on the social media platform and added in the last 24 hours “through a combination of machine learning based automation and human review, we have swiftly removed over 1,000 Tweets and permanently suspended a number of accounts for violating our rules — the vast majority of which we detected ourselves proactively using technology”, according to reports from AFP.

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Similarly, according to statements from Facebook, the social media platform had “quickly removed comments and accounts directing abuse at England’s footballers last night and we’ll continue to take action against those that break our rules”. 

The flurry of such racially abusive posts and comments on various social media platforms received heavy criticism from British authorities, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, according to reports from AFP.

Oliver Dowden, who is United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sports, voiced his dismay about the posts and called the players of the English football team “heroic” while emphasising that he shared the anger against the disrespectful posts.

He wrote, “Social media companies need to up their game in addressing it and, if they fail to, our new Online Safety Bill will hold them to account with fines of up to 10% of global revenue” in an attempt to warn the platforms against such content, according to reports from AFP.