The Chicago Sky’s new social media protection: How it works and how it came to be

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) – Chicago Sky co-owner Nadia Rawlinson knew things were serious.

The Sky increased security to nearly 24 hours a day – around hotels, outside gyms, by buses and planes. The things that Rawlinson said did not have to be thought about just a few years ago were now prime considerations.

It’s what led the Sky to form a unique partnership to protect the roster on the internet.

Earlier this month, the Sky teamed with Moonshot Technologies to protect their players on social media, the first relationship of its kind in the league.

“People think as athletes, we should take what comes our way,” Sky guard Ariel Atkins said. “We are human and some comments that people make are inhumane. It’s phenomenal of our organization to take care of us.”

Moonshot’s technology was created for use in counter-terrorism, and is also in use by the U.S. government.

“It’s a great thing to implement right now,” Sky All-Star Angel Reese said. “It’s really important to be able to have that (protection), especially as a woman.”

Rawlinson, who said her own experiences as a woman of color have informed her understanding of the issue, agreed.

“With the rise in women’s sports, the rise in attention, the greater fandom, the greater investment, all of it is historic,” Rawlinson said. “But there’s 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.”

After reading about Moonshot in a tech publication just a few weeks ago, Rawlinson reached out to its co-founder and CEO, Vidhya Ramalingam.

It was a quick connection.

“It was really clear there was a values alignment,” Ramalingam said. “Some of that stems from some of our shared experiences as women of color in spaces where so often our voices are underrepresented, and the desire to actually do something about it and not just sit there.

“For far too long, I saw women like me, people of color, be overrepresented as targets and underrepresented in the solution,” she said.

So what, exactly, does this technology do for the Sky’s players?

Moonshot monitors more than 25 social media and internet platforms, including those on which players do not have personal accounts. Their 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’s team of human threat assessors takes over. They look through the flagged posts, and report them, if necessary – whether that’s to the social media platforms themselves or, in more serious cases, directly to law enforcement.

It’s that human involvement that Ramalingam said is necessary to its success.

“This is not a problem that can just be solved by technology alone,” she said. “It’s fundamentally a human problem, and this is a human partnership.”