Female athletes are more likely to be the targets of vitriolic online abuse. But two Kiwi women have created a bot to call out the sports trolls, Ashley Stanley discovers.
Jump on any athlete or sports team’s social media accounts after a competition, and you'll find a stream of comments rolling in, littering their feeds.
Regardless of the result, there will be critiques of the athletes’ performances and, more often than not, personal attacks. And there are more women than men copping the online nastiness.
And for some, the bombardment of negativity is relentless.
For two adopted Kiwis, Jacqueline Comer and Rebecca Lee, the online abuse isn't acceptable. So they're creating bots - automated programmes on social media - to help sportspeople combat the written assaults.
The pair, who met while they were completing their Masters of technological futures a couple of years ago, have figured out a way to use technology “to detect toxicity" sent to athletes.
And they've gone one step further by creating the FairPlayBot - a piece of technology that can be attached to social media accounts to automatically respond to negative messages with positive ones.
Both Comer and Lee are keen sports fans. Canadian-born Comer moved here with her Kiwi husband and daughter, while Lee is originally from the UK but has lived in New Zealand for over 15 years.
During their studies, they realised combining their projects and personal interests could have a much bigger societal impact.
So, how does the bot work?
If a message sent to an account with the bot is deemed to have a certain level of toxicity, then it triggers a positive message in response.
“So if someone says ‘You should die’ - which does happen - we can respond to the athlete, ‘Keep doing an awesome job’. Or it could respond directly back to the person who tweeted and say ‘Hey, have a great day',” Comer says. “Sometimes it can get it wrong, it can say ‘That seemed really awful’, when it was actually great.
“But because we’re just sending out positive messages, it's not like you're punishing somebody for what they said. You're just making things more positive online, which is not a bad thing at all.”
Even though abusive messages can still be sent to sportspeople, the positive messages will go on top of them, “so it sort of distracts people away.”
Individually, concerning messages are problematic. But when you look at what the technology can do at scale, the knock-on effect could see a major shift in online behaviour.
“Some people get that crap everyday and it is insidious; that constant drip of negativity is awful,” says Comer, one of three co-founders of tech company Areto Labs.
“But if you look at it in terms of 300 athletes all at once, and be able to send out those positive messages, you can sort of change things on a larger cultural scale.”
For her Masters project, Comer was originally looking into microaggressions and toxicity in politics and online communities. Lee, meanwhile, was trying to find ways technology could improve the live sports experience (anything from standing in line for food and beverages, to the stadium music, and transportation options to and from venues).
"That little drip of acid or something that slowly just eats away at you” - Jacqueline Comer.
As part of their research, it became clear social media giants were not able, or willing, to protect athletes from online abuse.
“I was shocked about the extent to which athletes around the world are subject to social media abuse, particularly women,” says Lee, who's wanting to take her studies further and start a doctorate soon.
A 2019 study found nearly 27 percent of comments on well-read Facebook posts by major Australian broadcasters were negative towards sportswomen, compared to eight percent for male athletes.
“And we know the types of attacks that women get are different - they are definitely more sexual in nature,” says Comer.
“If we are ever going to have parity in sport, where women’s and men's sports are seen the same, then something has to give, and people on social media, like athletes, who have to use it, have to be protected.
“We know that women have a harder time making money and having financially viable careers as athletes, and that there is a huge opportunity right now through social media to promote yourself, to be able to get sponsors. And when you get those sponsors, you have to promote yourself more but social media is actually a really awful place to have to be for women athletes.”
The technology to help the situation is there, they say. It’s just a matter of having enough funding to run the FairPlayBot.
The duo crowd-funded earlier this year to try to get the bot up and running to support three English footballers who experienced myriad racist remarks online following the European Championship final. But they didn't reach their target.
It seems the three-day social media ‘blackout’ for football's fight against racism earlier this year also did little to get the big tech players to protect people using their platforms.
“The problem isn’t going away," says Comer. "Social media companies are not incentivised for it to go away, so we think we have technology that can certainly help change the conversations online, and help things be more inclusive."
That means, the two women - happy to be “feminists” - continue to speak with many organisations in New Zealand concerned about women athletes and “big international organisations” around the world about the FairPlayBot.
But Covid-19 has presented more barriers for New Zealand organisations who have shown interest in the bot. There are positive signs though, with a lot more people thinking about how to protect athletes online, especially around their mental health and wellbeing.
“We’ve been working on this technology for a few years now, and when we first did it, we got a little bit of attention. But people were like ‘What is this?’ and ‘Is it really a problem?’,” Comer says.
“But I think the issue is getting a lot more attention these days, when you see athletes like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles come out and say ‘My mental health is more important than your enjoyment of me playing a sport’.
“That’s pretty huge, especially as women of colour to come out and say, ‘Your abuse of me is not OK anymore and that I'm actually a human'.”
With three women’s World Cups coming to New Zealand in the next two years, it seems like a good time to see how this kind of technology can be used for major tournaments.
“It would be really great as a country to be able to say we think abuse online is completely unacceptable, so while you're here in our country and playing sport, we've got your back,” says Comer, who was once a sports journalist.
Lee says the short-term goal is to raise awareness of this issue. “To let people know that their positivity can make a difference in combating social media trolls and have athletes feel like someone has their back,” she says.
“We have a fantastic opportunity to show that we can host tournaments which promote and protect athletes both on the field and in the digital arenas.”
Ideally, they'd like to replicate the bot across more social media platforms and other industries.
Comer originally started Areto Labs by looking at women in politics and how parity could be achieved. “Because if you don’t have at least an equal number of women than men in government then you're never going to have laws that represent everyone.”
The three founders (the two others are based in Canada) created technology to support women running for office. They have used it in Canada, the United States and New Zealand. Collectively the political bot has analysed over 2 million tweets.
The research from the technology used for female politicians showed they felt validated in the way they were feeling.
“When they saw the bot had responded to something they were like ‘Oh yeah, that was actually a really awful thing for someone to say to me’, and because of that they thought somebody had their back,” Comer says.
“So they were more willing to stay in the race and do what they were doing. So if we can start to do that automatically and at scale, then you can see how you can start to make a big impact.”
A confronting aspect for Lee during this project has been the online abuse she’s received when promoting the FairPlayBot.
“It was very low level and the nature of it was almost absurd, calling me a terrorist/communist," she says. "But it did give me an insight into how athletes or their social media people must feel when reading these messages."
Another area Areto Labs is interested in getting into is journalism. “It's a big one that we are looking at because the three founders all have English degrees, which is hilarious... three English degrees [majors] with a tech company,” says Comer.
“We've all been journalists at some point in our career and we know how awful that industry is right now with that sort of thing.”
For journalists, Twitter is almost a must-have now in the profession. “It’s great that you can broadcast your thoughts and your stories on there, but the counter to that is all of the hate,” says Comer.
“When we analyse the data we have for the Canadian election, just to have to see that stuff everyday, it just starts to wear you down.
"That little drip of acid or something that slowly just eats away at you.”
