Instagram has announced new measures to tackle online abuse in the wake of a spate of racist attacks on English Premier League soccer players.
Manchester United players Anthony Martial, Marcus Rashford, Axel Tuanzebe and Lauren James are among those to have been subjected to racism on social media in the last fortnight alone.
A man was arrested after Romaine Sawyers was sent what West Brom called an "abhorrent message", while Chelsea full-back Reece James was sent abuse via an Instagram direct message.
Instagram does not use technology to proactively detect content within private messages but it has announced new measures, including removing abusive accounts, in a bid to reduce racist attacks in messages.
"I am horrified that they have to deal with that sort of abuse and as a company we take it very seriously," said Fadzai Madzingira, content policy manager at Facebook, which owns Instagram.
She said Instagram previously banned accounts for a certain time period when people broke community standards in messages. But now they can be removed forever.
"And we'll be closing those accounts more quickly in Instagram direct messaging than anywhere else on the platform," Madzingira said.
Stopping individuals from seeing abusive content in direct messages is challenging but business and creator accounts have the option to turn off messages from people they do not know.
Instagram intends to eventually roll that function out to all personal accounts, while a new feature is in the works recognising "that seeing abusive DMs in the first place takes a toll".
Racism has not been restricted to private messages, with a number of players seeing monkey emojis and racist terms left in comment sections of recent posts.
Madzingira says Instagram continues to work on comment filters that can block certain words, phrases and emojis from appearing.
"I think there is something about the world that we're living in where someone can go from throwing a banana peel at a player on the pitch to suddenly ... using this online," she said.
"What we're trying to address is the online aspect but there's definitely a broader conversation we need to have about what does racism in sport look like and how do we stop that sort of behaviour?"
Instagram says it took action on 6.5 million pieces of hate speech, including in direct messages, between July and September of last year, with 95 per cent found before anyone had reported it.
Australian athletes have also suffered racist abuse on Instagram, including instances of Indigenous AFL players being called monkeys.
