NCAA Study Flags 72,000 Harassing Messages Targeting Student-Athletes Across Seven Championships

In 2024 the NCAA partnered with Signify Group to examine online harassment across seven NCAA championships and the College Football Playoff National Championship. Of the 1.3 million posts and comments left on student athletes', coaches' and officials' social media pages, 72,000 were flagged by Signify Group's Threat Matrix AI algorithm for harassing language. More than 5,000 of those messages contained stark, abusive, discriminatory or threatening content. Among flagged messages, 18 percent contained sexual content, 12 percent were related to sports betting abuses, 10 percent included racist language, nine percent contained homophobic language, and six percent included other forms of discriminatory or threatening speech. Over 25 percent of youth reported experiencing some form of cyberbullying, with 38 percent of girls compared to 26 percent of boys experiencing online harassment.

AI-flagged keywords and sentiment scores identify what was said but not the relational pattern that distinguishes a single hostile comment from sustained targeting, fixation or the escalation sequence characteristic of abuse that causes measurable psychological harm. Detection infrastructure that tracks conversation history, frequency, coercion markers and the presence of multiple threat indicators surfaces the athlete experiencing sustained or escalating abuse to a coach, athletic director or campus safeguarding officer in real time, enabling intervention at the point when harm is building rather than after a crisis. A protection filter purpose-built to detect harassment and abuse of athletes, deployed within a platform operating across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other environments where student-athletes communicate, blocks hostile contact before it reaches the target and ensures that the adults responsible for athlete welfare are alerted when a young person is under sustained attack.