NCAA takes aim at online abusers threatening student-athletes through newly established Bad Actor Program

The NCAA announced on 29 October 2026 its active engagement in the Bad Actor Program, a new initiative developed in collaboration with Signify and IC360 to identify and address abusive, threatening and harassing behavior directed at student-athletes through social media and other online platforms. A 2025 GOALS study found that 51 percent of Division I men's basketball student-athletes reported receiving social media abuse tied to their athletics performance, while 46 percent received negative or threatening messages from someone who had bet on their game, with sports betting directly linked to 12 percent of all verified abuse identified in monitoring studies. The program builds on the NCAA's work with Signify Group since 2023 to monitor online abuse during NCAA Championships, and includes a dedicated reporting hotline, a student-athlete safety best practices guide, account support and broader user education through its Draw the Line campaign.

Guardii's athlete-abuse detection module intercepts precisely the kind of sustained targeting, betting-linked threats and harassment the NCAA's monitoring program now documents, alerting schools, teams or safeguarding professionals when a student-athlete receives hostile direct messages before that contact escalates into the hundreds or thousands of abusive messages documented by the Bad Actor Program. A Meta Business Partner backed by Startmate, Guardii detects threat patterns in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms rather than relying on retrospective reporting, blocking or flagging hostile contact before it reaches the target and enabling rapid escalation to the right authority in an emergency, addressing the operational gap between monitoring after harm occurs and preventing contact at the point of first approach.