Promises To Fight Racism Against England Players, Twitter: Disgusting Harassment Has Absolutely No Place

England national team on penalty shootout against Italy in the final of Euro 2020 (Twitter @HKane)

JAKARTA - Facebook and Twitter said they would do their best to remove racist comments directed at members of the England football team following their crushing defeat in the Euro 2020 final.

The two US social media giants have vowed to remove racist and hateful content that has sparked criticism from British political leaders.

The move came after a series of abusive messages on Twitter and Instagram owned by Facebook was addressed to Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Bukayo Saka, the three players who missed penalties in the high-five against Italy.

Bukayo Saka (Twitter @england)

"The disgusting racist abuse directed at England players last night has absolutely no place on Twitter," a spokesman for the San Francisco-based instant messaging service said.

"In the last 24 hours, through a combination of machine learning-based automation and human review, we immediately deleted more than 1,000 tweets and permanently suspended a number of accounts for violating our rules, most of which we proactively detected ourselves using technology."

Jadon Sancho (Twitter @england)

Facebook previously said it had "immediately removed comments and accounts targeting the abuse of English football players last night and we will continue to take action against those who violate our rules".

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other leaders have expressed dismay at online abuse.

Marcus Rashford (Twitter @england)

Culture Minister Oliver Dowden tweeted, "I am outraged by the horrific racist abuse of our heroic players" while warning online services.

"Social media companies must step up their steps to address this and, if they fail, our new Online Security Bill will hold them accountable for fines of up to 10 percent of global revenue," Dowden wrote.