Tackling online abuse is tricky in the Age of Gratification, but the GAA is right to keep trying

Last Thursday night’s Prime Time carried a really interesting piece about the new hate speech legislation moving through the Oireachtas. The ins-and-outs of the bill, and the fevered debate it has generated, need not detain us here, but in the course of the piece Senator Michael McDowell – a former minister for justice and attorney general – offered some useful clarifications on freedom of expression, and its permissions.

“The right of free speech and freedom of expression,” he said, “includes the right to be offensive. It includes the right to criticise other people sharply.”

In answer to a later question he returned to the same theme. “I’m not, in principle, against a modernising statute, but while we’re doing that we have to be very careful that we don’t extend criminal liability to areas which, at the moment, are considered to be in the domain of free speech, argumentative free speech, insulting free speech, demeaning free speech, and the like.”

The basic concept of free speech is familiar to everyone. Most lay people, not intimate with the law and its word salads, would have an approximate sense of where the boundaries lie. In this territory, though, we would be guided by a moral compass and a grasp of common decency, rather than anything that would necessarily survive cross-examination by a learned barrister.

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In this context, two phrases used by Senator McDowell were jarring: “insulting free speech” and “demeaning free speech”. Those permissions must have limits, and the semantics of the law in this regard are beyond our station too, but even for a simple mind they gave pause for thought.

Earlier on Thursday the GAA and the GPA launched a new digital campaign, targeted at the online abuse of players, managers, officials and referees. Online abuse comes in many forms, but much of it would fall under the umbrella of “insulting free speech” or “demeaning free speech”. The authors of such abuse might not even consult their legal team for clearance.

[  Michael McDowell: Do we really want citizens arresting one another for incitement to hatred? ]

It has often been said that the advent of social media has coarsened public discourse. In sport, what that really meant was that traces of the foulness and casual cruelty and lunatic condemnations that came out of some supporters’ mouths on the terraces, or on the car journey home, or on the couch, now had a variety of global platforms just waiting for blowhards who could type faster than they could think.

The kind of people who you would avoid in the pub at all costs were now liable to turn up on your phone. The difference from the pre-digital age was the size of the audience and the sheer levels of penetration. The echo chamber was no longer just a heaving train carriage on the match special.

So, toxic, excoriating, base, groundless commentary that would never have made it into print, or been aired by traditional broadcast media, now had a largely unscrupulous canvass. That permissiveness altered the tone of the conversation.

How is the counter-offensive progressing? Slowly. Last October the GPA released the outcome of detailed research undertaken by Tommy Doyle, the accomplished Westmeath hurler and the GPA’s digital media manager. As part of his dissertation for a Masters in Trinity, Doyle surveyed the GPA’s membership about their online experiences, generating a response from 2,134 intercounty players – close to 100 per cent of the GPA’s membership.

What emerged was that nearly one in four players had experienced online abuse at some stage of their career, and that number rose to 36% when the focus was narrowed to tier-one players in both codes.

“It was more an issue for younger players,” said Doyle, “because they have grown up in a society saturated with technology and social media engagement.”

There was an interesting extension to that point. Doyle also asked how many players had actively searched social media for commentary on their performances: about 45 per cent said they had. That trawl for gratification, Doyle said, was chiefly among younger players.

For that generation, social media had already been a fertile source of validation in their day-to-day lives, ever before they reached the public space of the intercounty game. They weren’t sweating on player ratings in Monday morning’s newspapers. Other feedback was available in familiar settings.

In that case, how can players be protected? Not easily. Maybe not at all.

Consider how intercounty players moderate their lifestyles during the playing season: their in-take of alcohol is severely restricted, their diet is prescribed, their sleep hygiene is monitored, their physical fitness is carefully marshalled. Being an intercounty player has become a conscious, challenging, lifestyle choice.

For every serious intercounty management now, keeping a weather eye on the mental wellbeing of their players is a critical part of a holistic approach; most teams would have a performance coach, or a sports psychologist, partly for that purpose. Anecdotally, you would hear of managers asking their players to stay away from social media – for their own good – but that always sounds like a middle-aged, top-down, parental solution to a younger person’s issue.

With all the other adjustments they have made to become intercounty players, is it realistic to expect them to filter their use of social media too? For other generations, abstinence was a multipurpose virtue, championed by church and state. Society changed. This is the Age of Gratification. Social media feasts on that.

There is little or no deterrent in law for the kind of online abuse that an intercounty player might typically encounter. In a presentation to an Oireachtas committee in April, the GAA president, Larry McCarthy, asked the government to consider a Protection of Volunteers in Amateur Sport Act. It is a laudable idea, but a long shot.

[ ‘You do what you have to do to win’: Gaelic games and the necessary art of cynicism ]

Every campaign against the online abuse of sports people is essentially pleading to our better nature: this is wrong, these are the unacceptable consequences of your behaviour; stop. But the kind of people who are inclined to abuse other people online are a tough audience to reason with.

In his first address to congress as GAA president, McCarthy quoted a phrase from the veteran American sports broadcaster Bob Costas. He described online trolling as a “corrosive assault on civility”. That is the world we live in.

The GAA and the GPA did a good thing on Thursday. In a fight like this, winning might not be possible. More reason to keep going.