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≡ SOCIAL MEDIA ABUSE ≡
At least at the Olympic and World Championships level, there isn’t that much social-media abuse hurled at athletes, but where there is, it’s intense.
That’s what the data show from a new report from World Athletics, sharing data from Threat Matrix from its artificial intelligence-supported surveys from the four major events in the sport from 2021-24: two Olympic Games and two World Championships.
At the top level, the amount of abuse is small. Across the 2021 and 2024 Olympic Games and the 2022 and 2034 World Championships:
● 1,441,583 messages were analyzed on Twitter/X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
● A total of 1,258 abusive comments or posts – that’s 0.00087265% of the total – rounding to about 0.09% were reported to the platforms, involving 254 accounts.
However, Paris 2024 showed an unwelcome trend of increase, with 809 abusive posts out of 355,873 total posts, or 0.23% after just 59 abusive comments at the 2022 Worlds in Eugene or 258 at the 2023 Worlds in Budapest. Worse, 82% of all Paris 2024 abuse targeted just two athletes!
This is similar to what happened at Tokyo 2021, where abusive comments were 63% concentrated on two athletes, both female. The overall numbers of athletes targeted was small, but has increased over the last two years, and as events were located in Europe:
● 23 at Tokyo 2020 (7 men + 16 women)
● 27 at Oregon 2022 (11 + 16)
● 47 at Budapest 2023 (21 + 26)
● 42 at Paris 2024 (21 + 19 + 2 non-binary)
The primary areas of abuse were racism (18-35% of abuse) and sexism. The report noted:
“[T]he majority of abuse targeting athletics athletes was sent in English. However, Spanish was also seen in large volumes – particularly during the Paris 2024 Olympics.
“The languages of abuse sent appear to correlate with the native language of the athlete receiving the abuse. For example, during Paris 2024 the second most targeted individual was a Spanish speaking athlete, and the majority of Spanish language abuse was targeted toward them.”
Further, online abusers appeared to be aware of the efforts to stop them and used emojis in increasing quantities in 2023 and 2024 to try and avoid machine detection related to speech patterns.
The overwhelming majority of abuse took place on Twitter/X, with Instagram a distant second in 2023 and 2024. As a result, World Athletics took action to assist several targets:
“25 athletes have been offered year-round AI protection on some of their social media platforms after having been identified as highly-targeted individuals during major events – this will be expanded over the next year(s).”
The next steps are an action plan by World Athletics to continue to extend its safeguarding program, exploring the depth and type of future protections.
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