Titled ‘The Challenges of Hate Crime in a Digital World’ and hosted at Stamford Bridge, the event was the latest step in Chelsea’s efforts to tackle hate crime online. Since March this year, we have developed a number of initiatives to tackle online abuse, including working with media monitoring agency Crisp to identify and address abuse on our channels.

In July this year, we also launched a new three-year partnership with the ADL, funded by Club Owner Roman Abramovich. The financial support of Mr Abramovich has helped expand the capacity of ADL’s Center on Extremism, which gathers and tracks intelligence for law enforcement agencies seeking to stop threats materialising into violence. It has also enabled ADL to partner with the Institute on Strategic Dialogue (ISD) a UK-based leading counter-extremism, ‘think and do tank’.

The keynote address was delivered by Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL [pictured top]. Jonathan spoke to the normalisation of extremism online, where social media sites are serving as a breeding ground for bigotry and hate. Jonathan cited an ADL survey showing that 41 per cent of users report receiving regular harassment when using social media.

Other speakers included Sasha Hacliveck [above], founder of the ISD, who presented their efforts building the largest scaled models for digital citizenship programmes. These educational programmes run both for people at any age through educational or employment settings, both of which are important environments to understand how harms emerge and how they affect other people – the essence of digital citizenship.

Representatives from Chelsea presented our work in tackling online abuse, including results from its partnership with Crisp. Since commissioning Crisp to moderate our social media channels in April 2021, over 12,600 items of Hate or Abuse have been removed from Chelsea social media channels (Facebook, Instagram and YouTube).