Racism, Sexualised Abuse Remain Most Abusive Social Media Post at Major Track Events

As World Mental Health month ended in October, World Athletics published findings from a study conducted during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games aimed to identify and protect athletes from abusive messages sent via social media platforms.

The study is the fourth of its kind published by World Athletics in the past four years.

It covers the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, the 2022 and 2023 World Athletics Championships in Oregon and Budapest respectively and now the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

The research was conducted to investigate online harassment of athletes during the Olympic Games.

The study focuses on the findings of this year’s research, with a detailed four-year analysis to follow later this year.

A total of 355,873 posts and comments were captured and analysed for abusive content across 36 different languages and dialects, with 34,040 posts being flagged by the Threat Matrix AI algorithm for review by human analysis. Each of the athletes covered had one or more active accounts across four social media platforms – X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. From the study, a total of 809 posts were verified to be of an abusive nature.

Racism (18%) and sexualised abuse (30%) continue to be the biggest issue, making up more than 48% of the total detected abuse, while general abuse* makes up 32% of the total detected abuse.