Elon Musk's X faces World Cup racism accusations

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FT Desk

Racist posts directed towards England players online during the 2026 World Cup were boosted by algorithms in order to surge engagement and maximise profit, a new report has determined.

A study by activist group Hope Not Hate found more than 5,500 explicitly racist posts aimed at England stars after analysing over 300,000 posts on X during the 2026 World Cup.

The organisation said X's recommendation section helped amplify the abuse, with inflammatory posts potentially reaching millions of users because content that sparks anger and outrage tends to attract higher levels of engagement.

According to Hope Not Hate, that increased engagement can keep users on the platform for longer and, in turn, contribute to advertising revenue.

"X is actually benefiting from this hate," Patrik Hermansson, senior researcher at Hope Not Hate told BBC Sport.

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"It drives engagement on its platform and it effectively uses its algorithm to elevate and show it to more of its users.

"They show up in the recommendation feed - they are not obscure corners of this website, they are front and centre. That's a choice it doesn't have to make and yet it does".

Jude Bellingham was the player most targeted by racist abuse, while Bukayo Saka and Kobbie Mainoo also received lots of posts targeting them. Djed Spence was targeted by anti-Muslim posts.

In its response to the report by Hope Not Hate, an English Football Association spokesperson said "all players have the right to play without being exposed to hateful, discriminatory and distressing content online".

"We want service providers to take all of the necessary steps to create a safer life online for everyone," they added.

Hope Not Hate believes that a lot more needs to be done to stop the racism in the first place rather than just reacting to it. Users have the ability to block racist posters or report a specific post, but that is after the offence has already happened.

"X doesn't take racism seriously enough," Hermansson added. "We've seen it for a number of years now. There is no change or improvement."

He believes that social media companies such as X have the ability to stop the surge of engagement on these posts as they come from a minority of users.

"It's actually a relatively small number of accounts and originating tweets that then get tons of replies," he said.

"I think it's entirely feasible to stop this, or a vast amount of it."

Hermansson insists that companies need to lower the rank of such posts so they do not spread as quickly.

Ahead of the new Premier League campaign, Hope Not Hate urged regulator Ofcom to make greater use of its powers under the Online Safety Act to tackle anticipated surges in online hate.

It also called for Ofcom to take action against algorithms that amplify abusive content and for major sporting events to be formally classified as “high risk”.

The research was conducted by searching for numerous terms relating to the England national team and then filtering out those which were not deemed to be racist.

5,500 out of the 300,000 posts analysed were viewed as racist.