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FIFA Will Use AI To Protect Footballers From Hate Speech
The new tool will look for recognized hate speech terms on social media platforms and prevent comments that contain them from reaching their intended recipients.
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.
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At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value
Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.
Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.
The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.
Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.
The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.
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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.
What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.
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