By: Parisa Yan

When tennis stars lose a game or match, they often see hateful comments or death threats on social media. But why are people sending these comments? One reason is that people gamble on sports, especially tennis. When the player loses the game, they lose loads of money and become very angry at the player. Why don’t the people stop? They just continue saying these things because they don’t get punished in return.

“It’s obviously been a problem my entire career. It has never stopped,” tennis star Sloane Stephens said. “If anything, it’s only gotten worse.”

Because of this, some tennis players are using Bodyguard.ai to block hateful comments on social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

How does this technology work? If you ban certain words on social media, people can just write their comments another way to express the same meaning. Unlike keyword blocks, Bodyguard can detect the meaning of what is being said and who it is aimed at to efficiently block abusive comments. These bad comments are not just criticisms. They are toxic. For example, when one player lost, more than 70 percent of the comments he saw were “toxic” or hateful. The AI can screen out 95% of toxic comments. Bodyguard.ai was very important for the players to be comfortable and focus on the sport, according to Caroline Flassier.

Top tennis players are hoping to bring back the joy in social media. “It’s just sad to kind of see that the thing that was supposed to kind of make us happy and make us socialized is giving us more negative feelings and negative thoughts,” Iga Swiatek, who recently secured her place in the French Open semi-final said. “So, I think these kinds of apps maybe will help us to, I don’t know, use social media and not worry about those things.”

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