No sooner had Bukayo Saka’s penalty kick thudded into the gloves of the Italian goalkeeper than you could see it coming. Racists were not going to miss the opportunity to attack the England team. And sure enough, within hours the sewer that is Twitter (even at the best of times) had become a torrent of effluent.
I don’t know a great deal about coding, but I can’t think it is really all that difficult to pick up certain words and remove them
Yes, it does show there is still an underbelly of racism in English society — even if the charge that we are a country of ‘systemic racism’ left over from our days as a colonial power is wrong-headed and unfair. In any case, some of the tweets doing the rounds may not be the work of English fans. To give a flavour, I am not convinced that ‘Rigoberto’ who tweeted ‘Italy and Argentina had no n*****s in their teams, both won the cups.
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