Australian eSafety Commissioner and Sport Integrity Australia Convene Summit on Digital Harms in Sport

Australia's eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant and Sport Integrity Australia convened a national summit in May 2026 focused on cyberbullying, online harassment and harmful digital behavior affecting athletes and sporting communities. Research presented at the summit, titled The Digital Sideline, found that nearly one in five children participating in organized sport reported experiencing cyberbullying related to sporting activities. Commissioner Grant stated that harmful behavior linked to sport increasingly occurs across social media, messaging applications and online communities, and officials noted that many reported online harms involved peers including teammates and competitors and occurred through private messages and group chats.

Cyberbullying of young athletes takes place in the private direct-message channels and team group chats where coaches and sporting-body administrators have no visibility, not on public feeds where standard content moderation operates. Guardii's athlete-abuse detection module, built for sporting codes and integrated across platforms including Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and others, identifies sustained targeting, pile-on harassment, body-shaming escalation and coercive patterns directed at child athletes in real time, surfaces a targeted player to a coach or safeguarding officer before psychological harm compounds, and blocks hostile messages before they reach the recipient. The system detects threat patterns rather than reading every message, protecting privacy while enabling clubs and national sporting bodies to meet their duty of care in digital environments where one in five young participants now report abuse.