Chelsea striker Romelu Lukaku believes that a meeting between players, social media CEOs, governments, and governing bodies could help in the fight against online abuse.
Lukaku has been abused by fans in the past, both online and on the pitch, and has previously stated that he feels racism in football is at an “all-time high”.
Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have implemented several new measures in recent months, such as being able to limit who can respond to posts, but star players in both the men’s and women’s games still regularly find themselves subjected to racist, sexist and homophobic abuse, as well as death threats.
Last season, Crystal Palace forward Wilfried Zaha stopped taking a knee, opting to stand instead in his own protest against racism and discrimination.
Belgian forward Lukaku can understand those viewpoints, with online abuse still continuing despite the players’ direct action.
“I think we can take stronger positions, basically,” Lukaku told CNN Sport.
“Yeah, we are taking the knee, but in the end, everybody’s clapping but sometimes after the game, you see another insult.”
The 28-year-old wants high-profile players to sit down with social media bosses and other stakeholders to help talk through a positive solution to the continuing issue of racism on their platforms.
“I have to fight,” Lukaku told CNN. ”Because I’m not fighting only for myself. I’m fighting for my son, my future kids, my brother, and all of the other players and their kids, you know, for everybody.
“The captains of every team, and four or five players, like the big personalities of every team, should have a meeting with the CEOs of Instagram and governments and the FA and the PFA, and we should just sit around the table and have a big meeting about it.”
How we can attack it straight away, not only from the men’s game but also from the women’s game?
“I think just [get] all of us together and just have a big meeting and have a conference and just talk about stuff that needs to be addressed to protect the players and protect fans and younger players who want to become professional footballers.”
Lukaku’s club Chelsea launched a ‘No To Hate’ photography competition earlier this year in the wake of racist abuse received by Reece James in January.
The club hopes the competition can celebrate the diversity of its support and Lukaku says the fight against racism is one that he will never grow tired of.
“At the end of the day, football should be an enjoyable game,” he said. “You cannot kill the game by discrimination. That should never happen.
“Football is joy, it’s happiness and it shouldn’t be a place where you feel unsafe because of the opinion from some uneducated people.”
Lukaku points to the collective spirit in the football world that managed to “stop the Super League in one day” and questions why that same fervor can’t be applied to eradicating abuse from social media platforms.
“If you want to stop something, you can really do it,” he says. “We as players, we can say: ‘Yeah, we can boycott social media,’ but I think it’s those companies that have to come and talk to the teams, or to the governments, or to the players themselves and find a way how to stop it because I really think they can.
Back in January, key football authorities and governing bodies, including Kick It Out, PFA, Premier League, and The FA, met with social media companies to discuss how to tackle online hate.
Between January and March of this year, Facebook removed more than 33 million pieces of hate speech from its platforms, which also include Instagram, with more than 93% of it removed before it had been reported.
