Can "fuck monkey" or "die" be removed from social media? LaLiga tries it with Mood
Last season there were 750,000 violent conversations related to Spanish football out of 6,500,000 analyzed. That is, 11.5% of the tweets, posts, reels and other publications were to insult or generate hatred. The average index of this emotion (number from 1 to 10) posted on the networks each day of LaLiga was 7.5, according to the meter established by the competition.
Well, May 25, 2023, matchday 35 of LaLiga, Valencia-Real Madrid match. Vinicius stands before the Mestalla audience and points out a fan who had called him a “monkey” and who had made monkey gestures at the merengue player.. It was the tip of the iceberg. The tsunami is unleashed on the networks. Hate multiplied compared to a normal day and the index rose to 9.33. LaLiga understood that it had to do something and so did many companies.
“The Vinicius case caused many companies to come to us with ideas to try to reduce that,” reveals Óscar Mayo executive general director of LaLiga. Finally, in the competition they decided on the partnership between Séntisis Intelligence and GroupM and together they created Mood (Monitor for the Observation of Hate in Sports).
Mood is an initiative to measure and combat violent speech on social networks during sports competitions, although Ícaro Moyano, GroupM's Strategy Director, has a more precise and, perhaps, more annoying definition that he shares with El Mundo: “It is a mirror of what we are and it's uncomfortable”. Indeed, it is. Although Fátima Gómez Sota, professor and researcher of sociology at the European University of Valencia (UEV), goes further: “Social networks allow anonymity and immediacy and are the breeding ground for reproducing violent and xenophobic ideologies.. Hence the importance of identifying who broadcasts this content and how it can be avoided and/or controlled.”
This tool analyzes the language expressed in networks using a semantic engine with more than 50,000 linguistic rules and Artificial Intelligence algorithms. Analyzes more than half a million conversations in real time and classifies them into more than 50 dimensions of violence. Thanks to it, messages can be identified and a study of the discourse on social networks is carried out based on various criteria such as the emotions of the users, the different themes within hate speech (racism, harassment or xenophobia), the volume of mentions. registered and their virality.
Display of the Mood index by days.
This information is reflected in the Mood index of the day, which is a figure from 1 to 10 that summarizes all this information.. This is shared through LaLiga's social networks as well as the mentions and the number of users. Last season more than 900,000 different people commented on competition content. “It will also go with a certain focus each week on what is most important,” explains Moyano.
The derby
On matchday 6, for example, the focus was very clear: The Madrid derby, the match that began the terrible wave of racism against Vinicius last season. Well, from one year to the next, hate messages have been reduced by 15% and insults among fans by 50%.. “Most violent behavior is related to certain groups (generally the Ultras) and matches where symbolically “enemy” teams face each other.. However, the vast majority of fans do not have these behaviors,” reveals Gomez Sota.
All Mood information will be in a dynamic dashboard with data segregated and accumulated by matchday, team, match, region, players or hobbies, among others.. “It is one more step in our fight to end racism, since we need to know exactly what is being said in order to take action and help stop hate inside and outside of football,” explains Mayo.
Former soccer player who suffered racism EL MUNDO
Mood is part of LaLiga VS Racism, as one more step in the detection and eradication of violent acts in football and society. “In Spain we have already forgotten about violence when going to soccer fields,” says Óscar Mayo and explains that one of the purposes of Mood is “for it to also disappear from social networks.”
One of the purposes of LaLiga is to turn football into “a transforming force in society” to talk about rights, equality and other principles that are not always respected in the anonymity of the networks.. “Education, regulation and detection” are the keys for the UEV professor to end this type of behavior on networks not only with respect to football but in general.