Arwen, in collaboration with the ATP Tour, Tennis Data Innovations (TDI) and Sportradar, launched Safe Sport, a new service to address online abuse targeting professional tennis players. Integrating Arwen's advanced AI moderation with Sportradar's investigation, education, and capabilities into a single service specifically designed to safeguard athletes is a groundbreaking initiative.
Extensive Protection for Top Tennis Players
Safe Sport, available to the Top 250 ATP singles players and the Top 50 ranked doubles players starting this month, leverages Arwen AI’s state-of-the-art technology to scan social media channels for toxic and abusive comments, spam, and bots in over 30 languages. Our AI-driven moderation system hides flagged comments in real time, ensuring players and their followers are shielded from offensive content. Arwen AI processes 600,000 comments daily, protecting over 750 million followers globally across platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, and TikTok.
Moderation combined with Investigation and Education
In addition to real-time moderation, Sportradar’s analysts will investigate threats and potential criminal comments, linking online abuse to real-world consequences. Players will also receive education on handling abuse, mitigating online risks, and maintaining social media integrity, helping them navigate the online landscape more effectively.
Player wellbeing in sports
Safe Sport is the ATP’s most comprehensive initiative in combating online abuse, addressing an ongoing issue in sports and prioritizing player wellbeing.
Andrew Azzopardi, ATP Director of Safeguarding, underscores the importance of this effort: “The ATP is committed to safeguarding players and their wellbeing. This includes taking a proactive stance against online abuse, which has become a very important issue in the lives of modern athletes. This collaboration will ensure that tennis is playing its part in tackling this issue and shining a light on the effects that harmful online discourse can have on our communities. We’re grateful for the support of TDI and Sportradar's expertise in making this happen.”
Matthew Ebden, ATP Player and Player Advisory Council President added: “Online abuse has become a real issue for so many professional athletes, as it also has for so many others online in general all around the world. Safe Sport is a game changer and has been developed specifically to help fix this problem.”
Sportradar and Arwen
Andreas Krannich, Executive Vice President of Sportradar Integrity Services, said, “This partnership is groundbreaking in sport as we’re bringing together AI-driven auto-moderation, education, and investigative services for the first time. The Safe Sport solution offers players better protection from online harm, representing a significant leap forward in safeguarding mental and physical wellbeing, enabling them to concentrate on delivering their best performances.”
Impact on scale
Matthew McGrory, CEO of Arwen, shares why this partnership will help bring him one step closer to making social media safe again, "This partnership is an important step for Arwen in terms of showcasing the stability of our AI technology on a global scale and broadening our impact. We are not only demonstrating the efficacy and reliability of our solutions in safeguarding high-profile individuals, but we are also advancing our mission to create safer online environments by working with global organizations like the ATP Tour".
A small step in sports but a big step towards Making Social Media Safe Again.
Read more about the press release here.