Boris Johnson supports match bans to punish online racism
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Boris Johnson has said he supports match bans for people who send racist abuse to footballers online.
During a meeting with other MPs in the House of Commons, the prime minister said that the government is: "taking practical steps" to ban racist abuse online towards football players.
"So that if you are guilty of racist abuse online of footballers then you will not be going to the match. No ifs, no buts. No exemptions and no excuses," he said.
Racism is when words or actions are used to discriminate or disadvantage people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin.
This decision is in response to the racist abuse three England players received after missing penalties in the final of the Euros.
The PM's comments follow on from an earlier statement from the Labour party, which called for football banning orders to cover racism online as well as in-person abuse .
Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho all received racist abuse online after the finals of the Euros
Currently, football banning orders do not cover racial abuse that takes place online, only in-person.
This means that a change would have to be made to the Online Safety Bill - an important legal document that the government has made, which protects people and makes rules for how everyone should behave online.
Johnson also said that as part of an update to the bill, big tech companies, like Twitter and Facebook, would be fined for not removing illegal and harmful content on their platforms quickly.
Earlier this week Facebook - which also owns Instagram - said it tries to remove harmful content as quickly as possible and encouraged people to use the tools it offers to block abuse.
"We quickly removed comments and accounts directing abuse at England's footballers last night and we'll continue to take action against those that break our rules."
Twitter's response was similar - in 24 hours, it had removed 1,000 posts and blocked accounts sharing hateful content.
It is sometimes very difficult to identify who has posted racism comments online as often people use fake names or anonymous accounts so finding out who they are so they can be punished them could be really difficult.
Also the proposed update to the Online Safety Bill has been delayed, and it is unclear when these new rules will come into force.
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