INDIANAPOLIS \u2014 Chicago Sky co-owner Nadia Rawlinson knew things were serious.<\/p>\n
The Sky increased security to nearly 24 hours a day \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s what led the Sky to form a unique partnership to protect the roster on the internet.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
\u201cPeople think as athletes, we should take what comes our way,\u201d Sky guard Ariel Atkins said. \u201cWe are human and some comments that people make are inhumane. It\u2019s phenomenal of our organization to take care of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moonshot\u2019s technology was created for use in counter-terrorism, and is also in use by the U.S. government. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a great thing to implement right now,\u201d Sky All-Star Angel Reese said. \u201cIt\u2019s really important to be able to have that (protection), especially as a woman.”<\/p>\n
Rawlinson, who said her own experiences as a woman of color have informed her understanding of the issue, agreed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith the rise in women\u2019s sports, the rise in attention, the greater fandom, the greater investment, all of it is historic,\u201d Rawlinson said. \u201cBut there\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
After reading about Moonshot in a tech publication just a few weeks ago, Rawlinson reached out to its co-founder and CEO, Vidhya Ramalingam.<\/p>\n
It was a quick connection. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt was really clear there was a values alignment,\u201d Ramalingam said. \u201cSome 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor far too long, I saw women like me, people of color, be overrepresented as targets and underrepresented in the solution,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
How it works<\/p>\n
So what, exactly, does this technology do for the Sky\u2019s players?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
From there, Moonshot\u2019s team of human threat assessors takes over. They look through the flagged posts, and report them, if necessary \u2014 whether that\u2019s to the social media platforms themselves or, in more serious cases, directly to law enforcement.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s that human involvement that Ramalingam said is necessary to its success.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not a problem that can just be solved by technology alone,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s fundamentally a human problem, and this is a human partnership.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"INDIANAPOLIS \u2014 Chicago Sky co-owner Nadia Rawlinson knew things were serious. The Sky increased security to nearly 24…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":75198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[1497,62,67,132,68,10190,232],"class_list":{"0":"post-75197","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-chicago-sky","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us","13":"tag-wires-bot","14":"tag-wnba"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114879568561157723","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}