LONDON: Former footballer Stan Collymore has accused Twitter of not doing enough to combat abusive messages after he was targeted by internet trolls.

Now a football broadcaster, Collymore came under fire after suggesting Liverpool striker Luis Suarez dived to earn a penalty in Saturday’s match against Aston Villa.

Staffordshire Police has saidit is investigating while Twitter said it took action against targeted abuse that was reported to it.

Collymore, a former Liverpool player who now works as a pundit for radio station TalkSport, said: “In the last 24 hours I’ve been threatened with murder several times, demeaned on my race, and many of these accounts are still active. Why?”

He later added: “I accuse Twitter directly of not doing enough to combat racist/homophobic/sexist hate messages, all of which are illegal in the UK.”

In another tweet he wrote: “Several Police forces have been fantastic. Twitter haven’t. Dismayed.”

The 42-year-old told the BBC he received “filthy racist abuse” from two law students on Twitter two years ago, for which one was jailed and one was ordered to do community service.

But he said police forces were now “banging their heads against a brick wall” because Twitter was not “furnishing them with the information” about users they now wanted to investigate.

“All it’s doing is providing a vacuum for anti-semitic abuse, racist abuse, homophobic abuse, sexist abuse, anti-disability abuse,” he said.

Earlier this month two people pleaded guilty to sending “menacing” tweets to feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, and a man who sent racist tweets to former Rangers football players was jailed for six months.

Several people were charged over tweets relating to the killing of soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich last year.

One man was jailed for 14 days for malicious communications, while a student who tweeted that anyone who wore a Help for Heroes T-shirt “deserved to be beheaded” was ordered to complete 250 hours of community service.

In 2012, a student was jailed for 56 days for racially offensive comments about footballer Fabrice Muamba. The tweets were sent hours after the Bolton Wanderers player suffered a cardiac arrest during a match.

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