Inside the WNBA’s Online Hate Crisis

The WNBA is getting a lot of attention these days, but there is a dark side to the fame. According to the times, the WNBA's record breaking popularity has also brought a record amount of hate and nastiness. It started with a fake post claiming the league would install dildo proof nets after a fan's on court prank. It was a satire that the journalist, the British journalist Piers Morgan thought was real and he shared it to his many millions of followers in social media. The hoax quickly spiraled into racist, sexist and anti LGBTQ attacks amplified by clickbait accounts and partisan pundits. Players like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Brittney Griner have been targeted with fake AI images, impersonations and death threats threats. League officials introduced something called a no Space for hate campaign and rolled out an AI filter called Social Protect to hide abusive comments on social media. But many players say it only masks the problem rather than solving it. Here's the real message. Congratulations to the WNBA for getting so much attention, more popularity, more viewers, more money, and more acclaim for Star. That's great, but did it have to be accompanied by so much nastiness, pettiness, violence, sexism and racism? It's utterly disgusting how some people just can't celebrate athletic greatness. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. I am fascinated by this AI filter called Social Pro Protect. I have not used it, I'm not endorsing it. It sounds like a wonderful thing. If you have knowledge about it, post your comments. I would love to hear. Here's what I'm getting from the news reports. It's an AI app that automatically hides hateful comments from user feeds. It doesn't erase the post site wide, but it filters what players and teams see. So if you are a player and you just had the best game of your life, you just won the game, you scored 40 points, it's a high. And you want to go check your own feed. You're not going to be inundated with people calling you a man and calling you a monkey or all sorts of horrible, violent, nasty, racist things. Which apparently is quite popular to do with commentators who follow WNBA games. And for those of you in other countries, let me be clear. It's the Women's National Basketball Associations Basketball for Women Confession I don't watch men's basketball. The NBA. I don't watch women's basketball. So I'm not an expert on this. I'm not a fan. But I'm happy to see that we are getting it's not parity yet, but I am glad to see that women are getting their due in sports and I understand there's huge controversy about how low paid WNBA players are compared to men. We'll deal with that issue another day. But I'm glad to see that they are getting on TV that they can in fact make careers as, as athletes because that didn't used to be the case. I'm old enough to remember where girls interested in sports were kind of pushed into cheerleading. Oh you can you like sports here, be a cheerleader. And many high schools, colleges simply did not offer many sports or marquee sports to women. So I think that's, that's a huge improvement. So this, this apparently is offered to players, families and the staff so that they don't have to see all the bile and nastiness. It's used by 11 of 13 teams. 90% of all rookies opted in to this social protect over 350,000 toxic posts hidden this season. Frankly surprised it's that low. I would think you'd have about that many per game because there is something about sports, not just women's sports, sports in general that I find brings out the inner, let me be polite here, the inner a hole in people. People who are normally nice, decent people, good next door neighbors, kind of neighbor who loan you a ladder. You get them following sports and all of a sudden they become wildly nasty people. If you're on a team and you're against the team they like, they feel free to just attack you in the most vicious, brutally dishonest way possible. And there's just something about the sports fan that does that. Let's not forget fan is short for fanatic and fanaticism does result in all sorts of nastiness and bile. Now this has also been adapted by the Australia Rugby League. Other other sports are doing. It was developed by CEO Shane Britton of Social Project. Doesn't cover direct messages or off platform harassment, but at least it's something. Now if you make a death threat against a player, I fully believe law enforcement officials should be engaged in that. Hunt you down and arrest you. That is, that's the sort of, that's not permitted in free speech. I don't care how much of a free speech advocate you are, nobody really advocates letting people give death threats. But if you want to just say somebody looks like some animal you don't like, well that can be very racist, nasty, mean, hurtful. Should it be protected speech? Yeah. I mean there are even people who go so far as to suggest that I look like a bald old man. No, I'm kidding. Yes people do that. But that's not hate speech because it's not even inaccurate, it's actually accurate. But sports players are subjected to nastiness and this is one area where there really is a sex difference. Yes, Michael Jordan has had nasty things written about him on social media, okay? But I think any fair minded observer who looks at what the typical woman player gets in proportion to what a male player, it's all out of whack. The women are attacked in the grossest and vilest sexual terms, gender terms, sexual orientation terms in a way that is just beyond the pale. It's truly sickening. I would hope some of the players and their families simply adopt the strategy of I'll post on social media but I'll never read a word of it. I mean that's one way of handling it so you don't get yourself in a permanent, permanent state of agitation.