Revealed: FIFA’s Quiet Experiment in Surveillance and Information Control
A first-ever look at how FIFA’s anti-abuse program created a powerful new layer of surveillance, intelligence, and control around global football — and possibly much more.
As soccer fans turned their attention to the World Cup, FIFA turned its attention towards fans – specifically, towards fans’ social media content, which FIFA has been monitoring and moderating in real time. The stated purpose of the activity — protecting players and other World Cup participants like referees and coaches, along with their family members and fans, from abusive behavior and threats online — is noble, but a closer look at the monitoring service and the company performing it raises major concerns about everything from censorship, information control, and conflicts of interest, to potential manipulation of betting markets, sponsorships, and ad deals.
Other than what is contained in a few reports released by the company itself, very little information exists about FIFA’s social media monitoring and content moderation activities. The same is true for the company performing the work, but a review of the company’s ownership and corporate records reveals significant overlap between company leadership, FIFA, the Argentinian football Association, and a “black ops” PR company with connections to Trump, Clinton, Tony Blair, Amber Rudd, and others.
An Opaque System With Outsized Influence
FIFA first rolled out its “Social Media Protection Service” (SMPS) in 2022, in response to increasing levels of hostility aimed at those participating in the World Cup. According to FIFA’s website, the SMPS “protects players, teams and officials from online abuse, keeping their social feeds free from hate” and “stops their followers [from] being exposed to abusive, discriminatory and threatening posts, preventing the normalisation of these kind of actions.”
The SMPS focuses on monitoring, moderating, and reporting content it deems abusive, acting on behalf of teams and players to identify offending content and then “automatically and instantly” hiding it.
They do this by “proactively identify[ing] accounts used by abusers” and “instantly hid[ing] abusive content in real time” in order to “build a protective net around players.”
But that’s not all.
FIFA also says it “unmask[s] abusers” — an activity usually performed by law enforcement agencies, not private sports associations. According to FIFA, the SMPS uses “specialist Open Source Intelligence forensic tools to de-anonymise and identify abusers to an evidential standard.” They do not specify how they choose who to “unmask” nor how they handle privacy-related issues. They say they use the information that they uncover about the identity of account holders to report people to the authorities in order to pursue criminal charges and also to ban the offender from purchasing tickets to FIFA events.
