Death threats, toxic remarks and racism: use Artificial Intelligence to protect tennis players from cyberbullying at Roland Garros

Frances Tiafoe says she received death threats on social media after losing professional tennis matches. Jessica Pegula complains about the same thing. And it also happens to Donna Vekic, directed at her and her family.

“Everyone gets them after a loss said Tiafoe, a 25-year-old tennis player from Maryland who was a semi-finalist at last year’s US Open and advanced to the French Open third round with a win on Thursday. “Such is today’s society. I know how it affects Mental Health people. Is very real ”.

Sloane Stephens, champion at Flushing Meadows in 2017 and runner-up at Roland Garros in 2018, recalls that frequently receives racist messages via the Internet, and said the FBI decided to investigate some of them.

“This has obviously been a problem throughout my career. never stopped said Stephens, who is black. “If anything, it only got worse.”

In an attempt to protect tennis players from such abuse at Roland Garros during the 15-day Grand Slam which ends on June 11, The French Tennis Federation is paying a company to provide players with software that uses artificial intelligence to block these negative comments. .

Each participant in each category – singles, doubles, youth, wheelchair and others, numbering 700 to 800 – has free access to Bodyguard.ai for use on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. This week, there were already a few dozen tennis players signed up for the service, according to Bodyguard.

“It’s really important for us: that the players feel very comfortable and can concentrate on the competition. tennis is mental . Really what you have in mind is what matters; you make 1,000 decisions in a game,” said Caroline Flaissier, CEO of the FFT, who said the federation paid between $30,000 and $50,000 to provide this service to participants.

“We know there is a lot of cyberbullying “, he pointed. “We have to solve this important problem, so we said to ourselves, ‘Let’s try it’.

This includes monitoring the social networks used by the FFT and Roland-Garros. A spokeswoman for the FFT said on Wednesday that 4,500 messages had been deleted out of a total of 79,000 received on these accounts since May 21 .

Yann Guerin, sports director at Nice-based Bodyguard, said the company’s software – which is constantly updated by employees who might notice new words or emojis that should be part of the content to be checked – requires less than 100 milliseconds to analyze a comment. and delete it if it is “hurtful or undesirable”.

He cited the example of a player who participated in the qualifying rounds last week, before the start of the tournament proper.

“He lost… so he was disappointed. Then he looked at his phone and said, ‘Hey!’ “, said Guerin, who estimated that more than 70% of the comments received by the tennis player could be classified under the heading “toxic”.

“Very bad,” said Guerin. “Not bad. Very bad”.

There is nothing unusual about this, according to some players.

“It’s a big problem in tennis. We get these stupid, abusive comments all the time. And, to be honest, we’re sick of it,” complained Daria Kasatkina, a 26-year-old Russian tennis player who was a semi-finalist in Paris 2022 and is the 9th seed in the current tournament. “People do it and they don’t get punished. Nothing. Only we suffer from reading all this m…”

Several actors, from various countries, have described nasty messages reaching them through apps.

After a loss, their accounts are often inundated with messages, often, they say, from players disappointed to lose money on a match. .

“Last week, I had three match points in the quarter-finals (of the Moroccan Open) and I ended up losing in a tiebreaker. And that was probably the worst (push) I’ve ever had,” said Peyton Stearns, a 21-year-old American who won the 2022 National Collegiate Sports Association championship for the University of Texas. “You keep seeing these ads: boom, boom, boom, boom. You have to go through it. You report it. You block it. It’s a nuisance and it drains you mentally.”

Some players are skeptical that the new AI system will fix the problem. One of them is the Czech Barbora Krejcikova, champion of Roland-Garros in 2021.

“Do you think it’s possible?” Do you really think it is possible to stop these things? There will always be something negative and it will always be about the results,” he said. “When you win, you get positive feedback. When you lose, you get negative feedback. That’s how that things are. It happens in all sports and not just for women and not just for men. It’s the world.”

And there are players like Tiafoe or the Croatian Borna Coric, seeded 15th at Roland-Garros, who have not signed up for the AI ​​service because hostility no longer bothers them.

“Of course the first two times I got angry,” Coric admitted. “But then you realize they are not good people. And they would never say it to your face.

Vekic said something similar.

“I wouldn’t say I got used to it, but it’s something that doesn’t really affect me anymore at this point in my career,” said Vekic, a 26-year-old tennis player, also from Croatia. , who was beaten Thursday at the French Open after entering as the 22nd seed. “These people play and I lose a game, and they lose money. So, after all, what does this really have to do with me?”

Still, every player the AP spoke to said they appreciated the FFT initiative.

“It’s a good way to help us feel less pressured with comments and stuff. It makes us feel more comfortable posting or sharing and talking about games when we know we don’t. we’re not going to get 100 death threats later. It’s crazy,” said Pegula, a 29-year-old American who has reached the quarter-finals five times in major tournaments and whose parents own the NFL’s Buffalo Bills and the NFL’s Buffalo Sabers. “I mean, I get them pretty much every day.”

The organizers of the two remaining Grand Slams of the year, Wimbledon and the US Open, are keeping an eye on developments in Paris.

“We have relationships with all major social media platforms and we take action to report comments that cause concern among players,” All England Club spokesperson Eloise Tyson wrote in an email. “We will be very open to feedback from the FFT and players on the technology they use at Roland Garros.”

Brendan McIntyre, spokesperson for the United States Tennis Association, said the organization is “assessing the product and determining if it’s something we’d like to have available to players by 2023 and beyond. “.

Kasatkina, who will face Stearns on Friday, said she was unsure about signing up for the show in Paris. Either way, she tends not to get comments on Instagram anymore before a tournament.

Then her eyes lit up as she considered another possible solution: winning the trophy.

“You only get all these messages if you lose,” he noted, later adding with a laugh, “If you win, then there’s only good stuff on social media. Everyone t ‘really like.”