Tottenham to hold review after Son Heung-min suffers racist abuse

Tottenham are to “determine the most effective action moving forward” after Son Heung-min suffered “abhorrent” racist abuse on social media.

The South Korea forward was abused following Sunday’s 3-1 Premier League home defeat by Manchester United.

Team-mate Davinson Sanchez received racist messages on social media after a 2-2 draw at Newcastle on 4 April.

“Another matchday and more abhorrent racial abuse suffered by one of our players,” said a Spurs statement.

“This has again been reported to the platforms and we shall now undertake a full review alongside the Premier League to determine the most effective action moving forward.”

Son, who scored for Tottenham in Sunday’s defeat, was involved in an incident in which Manchester United had a goal disallowed after he was caught in the face by Scott McTominay.

Tottenham said last week they wanted “social media platforms to take action” after defender Sanchez was subjected to racist abuse.

On Friday, a number of Premier League managers called for a football-wide boycott of social media, in response to the increasing frequency of racist abuse sent to footballers.

Scottish champions Rangers, plus Championship clubs Swansea and Birmingham, are boycotting social media for a week to combat abuse.

Swansea took their decision of a short boycott with players Jamal Lowe, Ben Cabango and Yan Dhanda having been racially abused on social media in the past two months.

Rangers followed Swansea when they also announced their players and staff would boycott social media for a week because of concerns about how platforms deal with racist abuse.

Liverpool also said racist abuse on social media “cannot be allowed to continue” after Trent Alexander-Arnold, Naby Keita and Sadio Mane were targeted.

At the end of March, former Arsenal and France striker Thierry Henry said he was removing himself from social media because of racism and bullying across platforms.

At the time, Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said on Twitter that “no-one should have to switch off social media because of abuse”.

He added: “Social media firms must do more to tackle this and we are introducing new laws to hold platforms to account.

“This is complex and we must get it right, but I’m absolutely determined to tackle racist abuse online.”

Twitter has said it is “committed to Kick It Out’s initiative to tackle online hate, and look forward to continuing these discussions and developing solutions with our partners in football”.

Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, said it took action on 6.6 million pieces of hate speech between October and December last year and will “take tougher action when we become of aware of people breaking our rules in DMs [direct messages]”.

Agencies