The All England Lawn Tennis Club has become the first to use artificial intelligence to protect Wimbledon players from online abuse.
The AI-driven service monitors players’ public social media profiles and automatically flags death threats, racist and sexist comments in 35 languages.
High-profile athletes who have been targeted online, including former US Open champion Emma Raducanu and four-time Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka, have previously said they had to delete Instagram and Twitter (now named X) from their phones.
Britain’s number two, Harriet Dart, said she sometimes uses social media just because of the “hate” she sees online.
“I think there’s a lot of positives to take from this match,” Dart said after her win over British number one Katie Boulter on Thursday. [social media] But there was also a lot of negativity. If I opened the app today, I think I’d get a lot of hate, whether I won or not.”
Tournament director Jamie Baker said Wimbledon had deployed social media monitoring service Threat Matrix, developed by AI company Signify Group, which will also be rolled out to the US Open.
Baker said: “This is not something that would be found in the public domain. It’s not something that we would be shouting about, but we basically scroll through social media looking for this type of content and it means we have access to information that we wouldn’t have had access to before.”
“We’re not just going to rely on players to tell us what happened to them, but if there’s anything that we feel is of concern, then essentially our security team will step in and actually help address that.”
He said the AI-driven service is also supported by people monitoring accounts, and players can opt for a more robust service that scans for cheating and blackmail via private direct messages.
Baker, a former British number two, said Wimbledon would discuss the abuse with players and then report it to technology companies for removal or, if necessary, to police.
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Explaining how the service works, Baker said: “If there’s an issue that we feel is of concern or worth reporting, we’ll ultimately communicate with the player and then work through the next steps. The benefit of this service is that it allows us to officially register the situation with the appropriate personnel.”
“But we can’t take those steps without actually engaging with the players and their teams and finding out what’s going on.”
World Rugby also uses the service, and in April an Australian was charged after a referee and his wife received threatening and abusive messages via Facebook during the Rugby World Cup.
Wimbledon said Threat Matrix conducted an investigation, monitoring more than 1.6 million public posts from X and 19,000 Instagram comments sent to 454 players competing in various professional tennis tournaments in 2022, and found that one in four players had been the target of abuse. 546 offensive posts were identified from 438 accounts.
Source: www.theguardian.com
