By Tom Parsons
January 23 – Stan Collymore has called for Twitter to make it their responsibility to take action against those who send abusive and racist Tweets. The former Liverpool star turned media pundit has been subjected to offensive tweets over a long period of time and has finally decided enough is enough and quit the social network all together – he returned to the social network later in the day.
Collymore, who had just under 500,000 Twitter followers, was specifically targeted in the last few days after comments on Twitter suggesting Luis Suarez had dived to win a penalty for Liverpool against Aston Villa on Sunday. A distressed Collymore contacted police as well as retweeting several of the abusive tweets he received. This has prompted a full police investigation into the matter.
This isn’t the first time where police have been called into deal with a Collymore Twitter complaint. In 2012 a law student was sentenced to two years’ community service and ordered to pay £150 legal costs after being pleading guilty of breaching section 127 of the Communications Act after racially abusing Collymore on Twitter. Un-Collymore related, 21 year old Liam Stacey was sent to prison for 56 days after admitting to making a series of vile comments on Twitter about Fabrice Muamba.
Collymore is demanding a tougher stance from Twitter. “I accuse Twitter directly of not doing enough to combat racist/homophobic /sexist hate messages, all of which are illegal in the UK.”
He continued: “In the last 24 hours I’ve been threatened with murder several times, demeaned on my race, and many of these accounts are still active. Why?”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4 Collymore suggested that friends of his had complained about racial abuse to Twitter and London’s Metropolitan police but the posts had “stayed on people’s timelines for months.” He also stated that he would want to “live my social media life as I would do in the street.”
A Staffordshire Police spokesman said: “We’ve been in contact with Mr Collymore to get more information and to reassure him that we will carry out a thorough and detailed investigation.
“Such behaviour is completely unacceptable and we all have a shared responsibility to treat each other with dignity and respect.
“It’s our role to investigate complaints of criminal behaviour and, where appropriate, take action. When we become aware of complaints about potential criminal offences, we gather evidence to allow the Crown Prosecution Service to make a decision on whether to charge or not.
“Our investigation into previous alleged offences is continuing and we are currently liaising with Twitter to obtain subscriber details.”
Although Collymore has now suspended his Twitter account, he will get all his followers back if he re-opens the account within 30 days. Whether time off the network, or Twitter itself, can stop the vitriol, remains to be seen.
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