INDIANAPOLIS (AP) 鈥 Chicago Sky co-owner Nadia Rawlinson knew security concerns were serious.
The Sky have physical security nearly 24 hours a day 鈥 around hotels, outside gyms, by buses and planes 鈥 but one of the final frontiers of player safety was the internet.
Earlier this month, the Sky teamed up with Moonshot to protect their players from threats and hate on social media, the first relationship of its kind in the WNBA.
鈥淧eople think as athletes, we should take what comes our way,鈥 Sky guard Ariel Atkins said. 鈥淲e are human and some comments that people make are inhumane. It鈥檚 phenomenal of our organization to take care of us.鈥
Moonshot鈥檚 technology was created for use in counterterrorism; it's used by the U.S. government.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a great thing to implement right now,鈥 said Sky all-star Angel Reese, who has one of the most popular social media platforms among WNBA players. 鈥淚t鈥檚 really important to be able to have that (protection), especially as a woman."
What does this technology do for the Sky players?
Moonshot monitors more than 25 social media and internet platforms, including those on which players do not have personal accounts. The technology shrinks the millions of posts it looks at every day into thousands of posts that contain direct threats to the athletes.
From there, Moonshot鈥檚 team of human threat assessors, from clinical psychologists to social workers, takes over. They look through the flagged posts and report them, if necessary 鈥 whether that鈥檚 to the social media platforms themselves for removal or, in more serious and imminent cases, directly to law enforcement.
They target actionable threats to the athletes, like the release of their personal information or possible stalkers.
It鈥檚 that human involvement that Moonshot co-founder and CEO Vidhya Ramalingam said is necessary to its success.
鈥淭his is not a problem that can just be solved by technology alone,鈥 she said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 fundamentally a human problem, and this is a human partnership.鈥
How the partnership came to be
Rawlinson, who said her own experiences as a woman of colour have informed her understanding of the issue, knew it was something she wanted to focus on.
鈥淲ith the rise in women鈥檚 sports, the rise in attention, the greater fandom, the greater investment, all of it is historic,鈥 Rawlinson said. 鈥淏ut there鈥檚 a dark side to that. At some point, you just want to play the game, so the goal is to remove some of the noise that happens off the court.鈥
After reading about Moonshot in a tech publication a few weeks ago, Rawlinson reached out to Ramalingam about a partnership.
It was a quick connection.聽
鈥淚t was really clear there was a values alignment,鈥 Ramalingam said. 鈥淪ome of that stems from some of our shared experiences as women of colour in spaces where so often our voices are under-represented, and the desire to actually do something about it and not just sit there.
鈥淔or far too long, I saw women like me, people of colour, be overrepresented as targets and under-represented in the solution,鈥 she said.
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This story has been corrected to show that the name of the company the Chicago Sky have partnered with is Moonshot, not Moonshot Technologies.
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