Major sports including football, rugby and cricket will unite this weekend in a social media boycott over lack of action on online abuse.

The boycott across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter channels will start at 3pm on Friday through until 11.59pm on Monday night.

Athletes, broadcasters and sponsors are also involved in the plans, which comes amid a rising tide of racist and sexist abuse directed on various social media platforms.

Many are calling on the platforms to do more to stamp out abuse, with harsher punishments for those found guilty.

Clubs across the Premier League, EFL, Women’s Super League and Women’s Championship will switch off their accounts.

Culture secretary Oliver Dowden suggested that racist abuse will be among the harms that social media companies have to stamp out.

Writing in newspapers, he said: “Under the legislation, if social media companies do not keep their promises to users by, for example, failing to remove racist abuse, they will face severe sanctions.

“We could see fines of up to ten per cent of annual global turnover. For a company such as Facebook or YouTube, that could be billions.”

He added that the threat of enforcement would get social media companies to act.