FIFA has announced that over 89,000 offensive messages were identified on social media during the group stage of the 2026 World Cup, marking a 13-fold increase compared to the 2022 Qatar World Cup. This figure has heightened concerns over the spread of online hate speech during major sporting events.<\/p>\n
According to FIFA, its social media protection system reviewed more than six million posts and comments. The report states that 11% of the offensive messages contained racist content, representing an increase from the previous tournament.<\/p>\n
FIFA also confirmed that approximately 1,000 accounts were referred to relevant authorities for further investigation, and more than 100 cases meet the criteria for legal proceedings. Additionally, the organization\u2019s monitoring tools hid nearly 181,000 hate-filled comments from official team pages.<\/p>\n
This report comes amid incidents where several Netherlands national team players became targets of waves of insults and racist messages on social media following their team’s elimination by Morocco in a penalty shootout. Previously, FIFA and anti-discrimination organizations had warned about the rising misuse of social media platforms against players.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
FIFA reports a 13-fold increase in offensive social media messages during the 2026 World Cup group stage, raising concerns about online hate speech in sports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16422,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}