The NCAA partnered with Signify Group to conduct its first online harassment study across seven Division I championships and the College Football Playoff National Championship, analysing 1.3 million posts and comments on student-athletes', coaches' and officials' social media profiles. Of the 72,000 messages flagged by AI-based algorithms, over 5,000 were verified as containing abusive, discriminatory or threatening content; 18 per cent of abuse was sexual (the most prevalent category), 12 per cent related to sports betting, and women's basketball student-athletes received approximately three times more threats than their male counterparts.
The NCAA study quantifies the scale and nature of athlete abuse, but verification of 5,000 abusive posts from 1.3 million messages occurs after the harm has been inflicted and the athlete has read the threat. Guardii's athlete-abuse detection module monitors direct messages in real time, blocking or flagging hostile contact—sexual harassment, discriminatory abuse, betting-related threats—before it reaches the target. Operating as a Meta Business Partner across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other platforms, Guardii detects threat patterns rather than reading every message, surfaces the athlete in acute distress to a parent, coach or safeguarding professional, and enables the rapid reporting to social-media platforms and law enforcement that the NCAA's findings call for—but at the point of contact, not months after the championship.
