Local press covering Warrington Pride had to turn off the comments section on their websites and social media pages because of the hate from keyboard warriors, Cheshire’s police commissioner said.
Pride was a fun filled event, but hateful comments dampened the mood
Commissioner Dan Price raised the matter at Friday’s meeting of the police and crime panel.
Mr Price said Warrington Pride was a fun-filled and entertaining family friendly event.
But the mood was dampened because ‘all the local press and the organisers felt that this year, unlike any other year, they had to turn off the commentary on the social media posts because of the style of commenting and the hate that was apparent’.
The police commissioner said,
And I raise this because I think this, ultimately, acknowledges the increase in hate that we see that sadly, all too often, only seems to be online as keyboard warriors take to digital space, and it wasn’t in any way reflected in the mood of the day in Warrington.
Hate is controlled by multi-million pound organisations
The Warrington Guardian was one of the news organisations which turned off its comments sections because of the ‘appalling’ nature of some posts.
Police and crime panel member Gemma Shepherd-Etchells asked the commissioner what he could do to tackle this kind of hatred online and whether education would help.
Mr Price said:
I think we saw last summer the power of social media to enable something that was so awful right across the country.
We were lucky in this county that we never had a serious incident, but my phone did not stop, and there were people fearful all the time when that was happening.
Police and crime commissioners, honestly, truthfully, across the country, are struggling with how can we, with the somewhat finite resources that we have, counteract something that is, frankly, overwhelmingly being controlled by huge, multi-billion pound organisations, and there is a lack of legislative levers that exist.
Education needs to reach the whole community
The commissioner said he was looking at working with a national retailer to come up with some kind of education program that might be able to go into communities.
We know that hate has been rising, but I can honestly say to all of the people who were covering this, the local press, the organisers themselves, some others that had to turn off commentary, that was somewhat of a surprise.
Media platforms and publishers should be held to account
He added there needed to be more stringent powers to hold publishers of social media platforms accountable for what they hosted on their sites.
