Sportradar Launches Solution to Counter Social Media Abuse

UK-based Sportradar Integrity Services, one of the premier suppliers of sports integrity solutions, has introduced a first-of-its-kind tool to help sports organizations for protecting professional athletes from social media abuse.

The solution is developed to safeguard the mental health and wellbeing of professional athletes by discouraging future trolling and abuse through successful investigation, proactive intervention and disruption.

The tool correctly identifies the individuals behind anonymous ‘troll’ or ‘burner’ accounts that engage in abusing athletes and even finds their exact location. The solution, with the help of Sportradar’s team of experts, offers a picture of how the individual conducts online abuse.  A detailed report is then shared with its partners and further support is offered in in taking an appropriate course of action, such as removing abusive accounts from social media platforms and working with law enforcement to bring legal proceedings.

The product has been successfully tested at the Exo-Tennis Series across Germany and the US.

Andreas Krannich, Managing Director Integrity Services at Sportradar said: “Maintaining the integrity of sport and ensuring that it’s safe, fair and enjoyable for all, has long been our priority. Now, with this new service, we’ve strengthened our position in this space by safeguarding the athletes who compete in it and protecting them from online harm and social media abuse.

“We are providing a tangible output that our partners can share with their athletes and we’re providing support to those partners in pursuing an appropriate course of action. The service we now have in place can act as a deterrent to future online abuse and create real change, particularly when people see the impact it has.

“We believe this safeguarding solution can have a similar positive impact on sport as our Fraud Detection System has had on match fixing, where we’ve reported more than 5000 suspicious matches across global sport in 11 years.