Savills Fires Employee After Probe Into Racist Football Tweets
Savills Fires Employee After Probe Into Racist Football Tweets
(Bloomberg) -- Real estate broker Savills Plc has dismissed an employee who is under investigation for a slew of racist comments on social media.
The worker was suspended in July following racial insults from his Twitter account about black players on the England soccer team after their defeat in the European Championship. His contract has now been terminated, London-based Savills confirmed in a statement on Twitter on Thursday.
The tweets went viral after the football team’s loss when three black players missed penalties in the final against Italy. In the following days Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho were subjected to a wave of racial abuse online, prompting a fresh call for social media companies to clamp down harder on such behavior on their platforms.
The Savills worker had claimed that his account was taken over by a third party, the company said in July. Police are still in the process of investigating the employee in question, according to Thursday’s statement.
Savills’s intervention comes amid growing pressure on companies to monitor their employees’ social media accounts in the wake of a series of events that included the murder of George Floyd by a White police officer last year.
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