INDIANAPOLIS (AP) \u2014 Chicago Sky co-owner Nadia Rawlinson knew security concerns were serious.<\/p>\n
The Sky have physical security nearly 24 hours a day \u2014 around hotels, outside gyms, by buses and planes \u2014 but one of the final frontiers of player safety was the internet.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, the Sky teamed up with Moonshot Technologies to protect their players from threats and hate on social media, the first relationship of its kind in the WNBA.<\/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 counterterrorism; it\u2019s used by the U.S. government.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a great thing to implement right now,\u201d said Sky All-Star Angel Reese, who has one of the most popular social media platforms among WNBA players. \u201cIt\u2019s really important to be able to have that (protection), especially as a woman.\u201d<\/p>\n
What does this technology do for the Sky players?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
From there, Moonshot\u2019s team of human threat assessors, from clinical psychologists to social workers, takes over. They look through the flagged posts and report them, if necessary \u2014 whether that\u2019s to the social media platforms themselves for removal or, in more serious and imminent cases, directly to law enforcement.<\/p>\n
They target actionable threats to the athletes, like the release of their personal information or possible stalkers.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s that human involvement that Moonshot co-founder and CEO Vidhya 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
How the partnership came to be<\/p>\n
Rawlinson, who said her own experiences as a woman of color have informed her understanding of the issue, knew it was something she wanted to focus on.<\/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 a few weeks ago, Rawlinson reached out to Ramalingam about a partnership.<\/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
___<\/p>\n