Can AI assist athletes in addressing cyberbullying?
Social media was ablaze in July and August with comments, support, and criticism as over 15,000 athletes went about their business in Paris for the 2024 Olympics and Paralympics. Throughout, an artificial intelligence (AI)--powered algorithm tracked online abuse, a topic that is becoming more and more discussed among professional athletes.
World Athletics released the results of a study that monitored 1,917 athletes with at least one active social media account across four platforms (X, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok) during the Paris Olympics on Thursday. The AI program identified 34,040 postings out of the 3,55,873 posts and comments examined for abusive content. 809 of them were confirmed to be abusive after a human review.
AI plays a significant part in it. The AI program can identify offensive content in 35 languages by tracking the approximately half a billion social media postings made during the Games. By using a threat algorithm, it will highlight posts that seem to be aggressive or nasty. Following a human evaluation of the posts, any required action is done if the posts are deemed abusive.
The greater goal is to make athletes feel safer in their social media environment, which is why the IOC and other international sporting organizations are using AI to identify and filter out online abuse that athletes endure.
