As interest in women’s sport has grown, so has the number of online harassment of female athletes – especially the most high-profile ones. According to The Net, a mental health support network for women in sport, 87% of women in sport experienced online harassment last year.
A new tool from The Net, developed by agency BarkleyOKRP in collaboration with WNBA league Chicago Sky, uses AI to prevent players from seeing harmful content while scrolling through their social media feeds.
The tool, currently in beta and available only to Chicago Sky players, uses artificial intelligence to detect hurtful comments in players’ X-Feeds (formerly Twitter) and then pixelates them. Each pixelated post is captioned with a banner that reads “Negativity Blocked,” a reference to the campaign slogan: Block the Negativity, Post the Positive.
Angel Reese of the Chicago Skys, who appears in a campaign video for the initiative, has had to deal with this type of hate many times in her past at the NCAA and is facing it again in her first WNBA season.
Rony Castor, Group Creative Director at BarkleyOKRP, noted, “Our developers were surprised by the amount of hate Angel Reese received on social media while researching and developing the app.”
Reese stars in the video alongside her teammates Chennedy Carter, Isabelle Harrison and Brianna Turner, as well as Chicago Sky coach Theresa Weatherspoon. The players are seen at practice, facing negativity on social media and then on the court itself, using basketballs to smash those comments to pieces as their coach cheers them on.
The premiere of the work took place on Thursday evening during the Chicago Sky’s home game against the Phoenix Mercury.
The WNBA invested in this tool because it tripled their viewership this season, which has not only led to more support, but also more racist and misogynistic hate towards the players.
“The mental health of female athletes is greatly impacted by social media commentary, and with the WNBA increasingly in the spotlight, this has only become more difficult,” said Tania Haladner, CMO of Chicago Sky, in a press release.
According to Javier Valle, creative director at BarkleyOKRP, many of the hurtful posts shown in the film are real content posted on social media.
“You don’t have to scroll far to see it, and this is the kind of thing that female athletes have to go through that male athletes can’t really understand,” Castor added.
Michelle Robles, creative director of social media at BarkleyOKRP, noted that the development of the AI tool involved the agency’s developers, creatives, strategists and community managers. Together, they pulled out X posts about Chicago Sky and its players and manually marked them as positive or negative to train the algorithm.
The team also considered phrases with similar meanings and different contexts of words and phrases to help the tool distinguish the context of words that it subsequently marked as acceptable or worthy of blocking.
“We can’t censor what people talk about, but we can disguise it so players can maintain the mindset they need,” Valle said.
A list of posts blocked by the tool can be found on The Net’s website. The list was published on Aug. 15 and is updated daily. Among the redacted posts is a carousel of positive comments about the team and its players, reiterating that “it’s not just about leaving the negativity behind, but about creating a more positive environment for the players,” Valle said.
The tool only works on X and is trained to block posts about Chicago Sky and its players, but Robles said the goal is to “continue to expand our language spectrum to train it to block even more negativity in all areas.”
She added: “We hope to expand that reach to be used across the league and hopefully outside the league and on a personal basis as we continue to develop this AI.”
