The FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar is scheduled to take place in five months, and football fans around the world are already looking forward to the spectacle. Unfortunately, not all fans express their excitement or disappointment nicely.

According to FIFA’s recently published report, which examined over 406,987 social posts across Twitter and Instagram targeting players and coaches for the EURO 2020 Final (England versus Italy) and AFCON 2022 Final (Senegal versus Egypt), 55 percent of players in both tournament finals received some form of online abuse.

The two most common types of online abuse were homophobic slurs and racism, with a majority of abusers coming from the player’s home nation.

Determined to protect players from the abuse they receive online, FIFA has partnered with FIFPRO, a worldwide representative organization for professional footballers, to launch AI-powered in-tournament moderation tools.

“Our duty is to protect football, and that starts with the players who bring so much joy and happiness to all of us by their exploits on the field of play,” said FIFA President Gianni Infantino. “We want our actions to speak louder than our words and that is why we are taking concrete measures to tackle the problem directly.”

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The new tool will look for recognized hate speech terms on social media websites and prevent comments that contain them from reaching their intended recipients and their following, minimizing their reach. FIFA could also report abuse to the relevant social networks and contact law enforcement authorities to further investigate.

“This detection is not only there to protect football and to avoid the damaging effects that these posts can cause, but also to educate current and future generations who engage with our sport on social media as well as on the field of play,” added the FIFA President.

The role of artificial intelligence in the detection of hate speech is growing rapidly. In the first quarter of 2020, Facebook, estimated that AI proactively detected 88.8 percent of the hate speech content the social network removed, an increase of 8.6 percent compared with the quarter before that.