Former England international soccer player and talkSPORT pundit Stan Collymore deleted his Twitter account a day after he accused the social network of “not doing enough” to investigate the mass of racial slurs and death threats he has received recently.
Collymore also accused the network of not having adequate age verification procedures and accusing them of “hiding behind” claims that they can’t comment on individual cases.
The account, which had more than 505,000 followers, was taken offline Thursday morning after a full-page story in The Sun spoke about the situation. The Guardian reports that Collymore’s ex-girlfriend accused the former soccer player of being a “vile hypocrite” for criticizing online abuse.
Ulrika Jonsson explained, “It must be horrendous to be vilified for your beliefs, your colour or your sexuality. In no way do I agree with trolling or abuse on Twitter. The people that do it are pathetic cowards. But Stan is too. He is actually one of the people he’s criticising.” She also repeated claims that Collymore was violent toward her during their relationship.
Before deleting his account, Stan Collymore tweeted to his fans, “In the last 24 hours I’ve been threatened with murder several times, demeaned on my race, and many of these accounts are still active. Why? I accuse Twitter directly of not doing enough to combat racist/homophobic/sexist hate messages, all of which are illegal in the UK.”
He added later, “Several Police forces have been fantastic. Twitter haven’t. Dismayed.”
The social network insisted earlier that it has a process to assist the police in responding to racist abuse. The comments came after talkSPORT released a statement threatening to boycott Twitter. It also wrote to the social network to “express the station’s dissatisfaction with Twitter’s apparent lack of support of presenter Stan Collymore.”
No word on where Collymore will consider reactivating his account if/when the abusers are caught.
[Image: screencap from Twitter]
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