A disturbing trend has emerged from Japan’s football terraces, where female fans are being shamed into cleaning stadiums after matches, a practice now being urged upon UK fans by campaigners. As a technologist who has spent years watching Silicon Valley export its ‘move fast and break things’ ethos, I see a familiar pattern: the weaponisation of social pressure backed by algorithmic amplification.
The phenomenon first gained global attention during the 2018 World Cup in Russia, when Japanese fans, regardless of gender, were celebrated for cleaning up rubbish after matches. But a darker reality has since surfaced. Reports from Japanese media reveal that women are disproportionately targeted by online shaming campaigns if they do not participate. Hashtags like #CleanYourStadium and ##JoseiNoSutajiamu (Women’s Stadium) trend on X (formerly Twitter), with users posting photos of women leaving litter behind. The algorithm, trained to prioritise engagement, amplifies these posts, creating a feedback loop of public humiliation.
Now, UK-based campaigners, inspired by Japan’s ‘cleaning culture’, are pressuring British football authorities to adopt similar measures. But as someone who has worked on AI ethics for a decade, I urge caution. What begins as a voluntary act of civic duty can quickly curdle into coercive surveillance. In Japan, the line between collective responsibility and gender-based guilt-tripping has already blurred. Women report feeling ‘watched’ and ‘judged’ not just by fellow fans but by an invisible digital panopticon of cameras and social media bots.
Let me break down the technology at play here. Social media platforms use engagement metrics to decide what content to surface. A post shaming a female fan for not picking up a crisp packet generates more clicks than one praising her for doing so because outrage drives interaction. The algorithm learns to prioritise shame over celebration. This is not a bug; it is a feature of the attention economy. When campaigners import the ‘do it at home’ hashtag into UK football, they unwittingly import this algorithmic bias.
But the issue goes deeper. In Japan, the shaming is amplified by a culture of ‘reading the air’ (kuuki wo yomu) where social harmony is prized. Women, already marginalised in a patriarchal society, feel the pressure acutely. In the UK, with its own deep-seated gender inequalities, the same dynamic could play out. The ‘user experience’ of society for women in football has already been poisoned by sexist chants and harassment. Adding digital shaming to the mix is like throwing petrol on a fire.
I am not arguing against cleanliness. I am arguing against a system that outsources enforcement to an unaccountable algorithm. We saw the same with the ‘dog-piling’ of individuals who forget to wear masks during the pandemic. The technology does not care about nuance. It does not know that a woman might be carrying a child, or have a disability, or simply be exhausted after a 90-minute match. It only knows that shame drives engagement.
Japan’s experience offers a warning. The government there has had to step in to combat ‘online bashing’ with new guidelines for social media companies. But the damage is done. The cleaning has become a performance, a way for fans to prove their virtue rather than a genuine act of community. The stadiums are cleaner but the social fabric is frayed.
For the UK, I propose a different path. Instead of social shaming, use technology to enable rather than enforce. Smart bins with gamification elements that reward entire sections for clean behaviour. Opt-in systems where fans can volunteer to join cleaning crews in exchange for loyalty points. And crucially, anonymised reporting mechanisms that do not single out individuals for public ridicule.
The future of football, and indeed of any public activity, depends on getting this balance right. We have the tools to create a society that works for everyone. But we must resist the temptation to build a system that runs on shame. Because as any technologist will tell you, once that genie is out of the bottle, it is very hard to put it back in. The ball is in our court.
