As women’s sports have grown in interest, so too has online harassment for women athletes — especially its most visible players. According to The Net, a mental health support network for women in sports, 87% of women in sports have experienced online harm in the past year.
A new tool from The Net, which was created by agency BarkleyOKRP in partnership with WNBA league the Chicago Sky, uses AI to block players from seeing harmful content while scrolling their social media feeds.
The tool, which is currently in beta and only available to Chicago Sky players, uses AI to detect harmful comments on players’ X (formerly Twitter) feeds and then blurs them out. Each blurred post is topped with a banner that reads “negativity blocked,” which ties back to the campaign tagline: Block the negativity, post up positivity.
The Chicago Sky’s own Angel Reese, who fronts a campaign video for the initiative, has a history of dealing with this type of hate from her past in the NCAA and continues to face it during her debut WNBA season.
Rony Castor, group creative director at BarkleyOKRP, noted “our developers, in the process of doing the research and building the app, were taken aback at how much hate that Angel Reese receives on social.”
Reese stars in the video alongside fellow teammates Chennedy Carter, Isabelle Harrison and Brianna Turner and Chicago Sky coach Theresa Weatherspoon. The players are seen at practice where they are confronted with negativity on social media, then on the court itself. They use basketballs to smash those comments to pieces, as their coach cheers them on.
The work premiered during Thursday night’s Chicago Sky home game against the Phoenix Mercury.
The WNBA has invested in the tool as it has tripled its viewership numbers this season, bringing not just an influx of support but increased racist, misogynistic hate to the players.
“The mental health of female athletes is heavily affected by social media comments, and with more eyes on the WNBA, it’s only gotten more challenging,” said Tania Haladner, CMO of the Chicago Sky, in a press release.
According to Javier Valle, creative director at BarkleyOKRP, many of the harmful posts seen in the film are real content posted on social media.
“You don’t have to scroll that far to see it, and this is the type of stuff that female athletes have to go through that male athletes can’t really relate to,” added Castor.
Michelle Robles, creative director, social at BarkleyOKRP, noted that building the AI tool involved developers, creatives, strategists and community managers at the agency. Together, they pulled X posts about the Chicago Sky and its players and manually marked them as positive or negative to train the algorithm.
The team also included language with similar meanings, as well as different contexts of words and phrases to help the tool distinguish the context of the words they then marked as acceptable or worthy of blocking.
“We cannot censor what people are talking about, but we can blur it out, so that the players can stay in the mindset that they need to be in,” said Valle.
The Net’s website features a tally of posts blocked by the tool, which went live on August 15 and will be updated daily. Underneath the blurred posts is a carousel of positive comments about the team and its players, reiterating that “it’s not only about leaving the negativity behind, but also fostering a more positive environment for the players to be in,” said Valle
The tool only works on X and is trained to block posts about the Chicago Sky and its players, but Robles said the goal is to “continue to expand our range of language to educate it into blocking even more negativity across the board.”
She added, “our hope is to expand that reach to be something that can be used across the league, hopefully outside of the league and on a personal basis as we continue to develop this AI.”
