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≡ PARIS 2024 ≡
World Athletics has been monitoring social-media platforms for athlete abuse over the past four years, with a report issued Thursday on abuse at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
This is separate and apart from the social-media abuse monitoring and reporting efforts by the International Olympic Committee, and the study by Signify Group was not made available for download. But the story on the World Athletics site noted:
● 1,917 athletes, coaches and officials covered
● 355,873 posts monitored in 36 languages
● 34,040 posts flags for evaluation (9.6%)
● 809 posts verified as abusive; 128 reported
So, of the 355,873 posts monitored on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X (ex-Twitter), only 0.22% were confirmed as abusive. That’s a low number, but still more than desired.
This is an expansion of the program used by World Athletics and Signify for the 2023 World Athletics Championships in Budapest (HUN), which covered:
● 1,344 athletes (only)
● 449,209 posts on Instagram and X (only)
● 258 abusive posts (0.05%)
The heightened rate of abusive posts for Paris 2024 as opposed to the 2023 Worlds is partly due to the added coverage on Facebook and TikTok, but also the higher profile of the Olympic Games vs. the World Athletics Championships.
Two disturbing parallels between the 2023 Worlds and 2024 Olympic Games:
● Two athletes (not named) received 44% of all accounted abuse, and at Paris 2024, two athletes (not named) received 82% of all abuse!
● U.S. athletes were especially targeted. In 2023, 46% of all athletes abused were Americans, and for Paris 2024, 49% of all abuse was directed at U.S. team members.
For Paris 2024, athletes from 20 countries were targeted, with racism (18% of all abusive posts) and sexualized comments (30%) both highly prevalent. Generally abusive comments made of 32% of the total. Other categories of abuse included homophobia (5%), doping accusations (3%), violence (2%) and family (2%).
The International Olympic Committee’s own Paris 2024 system reviewed 2.4 million posts and comments in 35 languages, covering the social-media handles of more than 10,400 athletes using 20,000 accounts, on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X.
More than 152,000 posts were identified for review and more than 10,200 were flagged (about 0.4%) and reported to the platforms for action. About 8,900 accounts were detected as sending abusive messages, with 353 athletes specifically targeted for abuse.
Observed: Nope, not going to guess who the two most-abused athletes were, either in Budapest in 2023 or Paris in 2024.
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