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Life online has changed for WNBA players.
Skyrocketing viewership, attention and investment also opened the floodgates to a deluge of racist, misogynistic and homophobic abuse. Over the last year, online behavior has spilled into real life, from fans throwing sex toys onto the court during games to stalkers attempting to meet star players. And the proliferation of sports gambling has added fuel to this fire of online abuse as disgruntled bettors take out their frustrations on athletes.
But players don’t have the luxury of opting out — or logging off. With minimum salaries starting at $66,000, WNBA players generate the bulk of their income through endorsement deals and partnerships that can revolve entirely around online campaigns. Athletes in women’s sports remain uniquely tied to their online profiles as a secondary income stream, creating a heightened vulnerability to online abuse and other harassment.
Chicago Sky Operating Chairman Nadia Rawlinson knows there isn’t a singular solution to this problem. But as attention and abuse continue, Rawlinson hopes to insulate Sky players from this rapidly deteriorating online environment.
Midway through this season, the Sky announced a partnership with Moonshot, a cybersecurity company that previously specialized in counterterrorism. The investment will utilize the company’s proprietary technology to improve the Sky’s cybersecurity measures by tracking and responding to the rapidly growing mess of online abuse, threats and harassment players face.
By nature, cybersecurity can feel like a reactionary process. A threat has to arise in order to be addressed. And given the vastness of the internet — and the enormity of online attention on the WNBA — it can be easy for legitimate issues to slip through the cracks. But Rawlinson doesn’t want to get stuck waiting around for the next crisis.
“We do not want to be reactive, sitting on our hands, worried and anxious,” she told the Tribune. “There’s something to be said for feeling like you can take control back.”
Preventing real-life risk
Two weeks ago, Michael Lewis pleaded guilty in an Indianapolis courtroom to stalking and harassment charges for threatening behavior toward Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark.
Six months earlier, Lewis had traveled to Indianapolis from Texas after fabricating an “imaginary relationship” with Clark. He bombarded her with threatening messages that left her “very fearful,” according to court documents. After pleading guilty, Lewis was sentenced to 2½ years in prison in addition to a no-contact order that bans him from Fever games and facilities.
Lewis is only the latest women’s basketball stalker to face legal consequences for online harassment. Robert Cole Parmalee was arrested for stalking Paige Bueckers last August after traveling to Connecticut from Oregon. Before his arrest, Parmalee posted on social media that he planned to propose to Bueckers and force her expulsion from Connecticut.
This is not an anomaly. Stalking is an issue that affects women across all sports — for instance, tennis star Iga Swiatek was confronted during a Miami Open practice in March by a man who had previously harassed her on social media.
Moonshot founder Vidhya Ramalingam believes this escalation from online abuse to in-person stalking is a common pattern — and one that security teams can learn to anticipate.
“Online abuse doesn’t stay online,” Ramalingam said. “It has real-world impacts.”
Those real-world implications have been obvious to the Sky, who have spent the last two seasons grappling with intensified online activity that, at times, threatens to spill over into in-person altercation. This activity has been sharply focused on second-year pro Angel Reese, a two-time All-Star who garners a disproportionate percentage of the online abuse facing the entire WNBA.
The Sky front office could feel a change coming to the league even before the 2024 draft brought high-profile stars such as Clark and Reese and new levels of popularity. The team bolstered its security and contracted law enforcement to patrol practices. But that wasn’t enough to give Rawlinson confidence that the Sky could anticipate future incidents.
“We’re vigilant,” she said. “But there have still been a few incidents that we’ve handled ourselves that have given us concern. Overall, there’s just a high level of vigilance around this team.”
Isolating information
Stalker cases are the most extreme example of how online abuse can devolve into offline situations. But what about the rest of it?
Moonshot operates a custom set of artificial intelligence models trained to identify threats of violence, sexual content and abuse behaviors that are indicative of stalking. These models rake through millions of posts on platforms to separate out the thousands of posts that contain threats and other behavior flagged for risk.
The posts are collected from 25 platforms, ranging from typical social media apps such as X and TikTok to dark-web sites where most athletes and sports fans tend not to traverse. The information is then analyzed by a team of former law enforcement professionals, clinical psychologists and professional risk assessors to determine the next steps for intervention.
Moonshot tracks a wide range of concerning posts. They include harassment and abuse — such as racism, misogyny and homophobia — in addition to doxxing, conspiracy theories, AI-generated deepfakes and impersonation.
Some of this behavior — such as intimate image abuse — is illegal. Other actions are prohibited in the terms and conditions of social media platforms, giving the Sky recourse to pressure a company to remove a post. But a sprawling expanse of abusive online behavior doesn’t technically violate federal laws or individual company policies.
That doesn’t make the information any less valuable. The Sky still want to gather as much information as possible about how their players are treated online to better understand the landscape of fandom and cybersecurity surrounding the league.
“There are a lot of anecdotal feelings and emotions that go into this stuff,” Rawlinson said. “People will say, ‘Oh, it sort of feels like the online abuse is getting worse.’ But then other people discount it because they don’t experience it in the same way. One of the things I was looking to do is to put rigor and data behind some of these anecdotal experiences.”
Data modeling for online abuse has become a focus across sports in recent years. The NCAA conducted a pilot study during the 2023-24 college sports season to establish a “threat matrix” for online abuse. The study found that women’s basketball players garnered the highest volume of online abuse — nearly three times as much as men’s basketball and more than 10 times the amount aimed at college football players. Nearly a third of that abuse was categorized as sexual or misogynistic.
This isn’t surprising to Ramalingam. According to Moonshot’s data, 92% of women in public life face online abuse, and 31% of that harassment is sexual in nature. Black and queer women are disproportionately targeted within this subset. This places the WNBA — which is composed of a majority of Black women and a high population of publicly queer women — in a state of heightened risk.
“You’ve just got to stick to your cores and your values and get the support that you need because a lot of it is tough,” Sky guard Ariel Atkins said. “Some people in this league get it worse than others. We’ve got one on our team that gets it worse than others. For some reason, our team gets it more than others. I’m not really sure why. But kudos to our organization being aware and bringing in private cybersecurity to be able to help us.”
The first step for the partnership between the Sky and Moonshot is a massive data compilation. In this preliminary year, Ramalingam plans to construct detailed datasets that provide a more comprehensive picture of the forms and functions of online abuse and misinformation facing the Sky and its players.
When necessary, Moonshot will use this information to contact law enforcement officials to report risks of potential threats. But more often, the data the company tracks will be compiled into evidence dossiers for two uses — lobbying social media platforms to remove content and preparing for potential legal battles against offenders.
Moonshot aims for players to be as removed from this process as possible. Because the company’s AI models proactively scour the web for data, Sky players are not asked to turn over their social media accounts for inspection. Players will be occasionally briefed on trends and measures to reduce their personal vulnerability online, but the bulk of these efforts to improve cybersecurity occur in the background without athlete involvement.
“Sometimes when you look at victims of certain events, you look to them to solve the problem too,” Rawlinson said. “Part of our role is to be the heat shield for the things that come at them.”
Fact from fiction
Reese was a senior at LSU the first time she was targeted by a sexually explicit deepfake.
By the time she encountered the image, it was hard to track down its origin. It felt like the violation was everywhere. A family member sent a copy of the falsified picture to her, questioning whether it was real. At age 21, Reese didn’t know how to respond.
Throughout her professional career, Reese has remained a target of deepfake technology, a form of AI-powered image manipulation that allows users to replicate a person’s likeness or voice. Users create deepfakes of celebrities in a variety of fabricated situations — and, at its worst, to create pornographic images and videos.
Forcing the removal of even a single deepfake often involves a lengthy legal process. Through the team’s partnership with Moonshot, Rawlinson aims to take that burden off Reese’s shoulders.
“It’s a lot to ask of anyone, period, let alone someone who is 23, just coming out of school, working their first job out of college,” Rawlinson said. “It is a burden that I wouldn’t ask anyone to carry, no matter who they are or how much money they make or what public platform they have. Anything that we can do to support her — that is what’s important.”
Intimate image abuse is illegal under federal law, which was bolstered in May when President Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act.
This piece of legislation focuses primarily on the dissemination of these images, leaving limited recourse for the individuals and companies that built and utilized software to create pornographic deepfakes. But it still provides a stronger foundation for companies such as Moonshot to pursue legal action against the circulation of intimate images and depictions of Reese and other Sky players.
LeBron James’ legal team issued a cease-and-desist letter in June to FlickUp, a generative AI company, over a sexually explicit deepfake video created through the app that included a depiction of James. FlickUp founder Jason Stacks later told technology publication 404 Media that he removed realistic modeling options — which allowed users to easily create deepfakes of prominent athletes such as James — from the app because of legal threats.
These legal precedents provide a roadmap for the Sky and Moonshot to take legal action over sexually explicit deepfakes. But the majority of the falsified videos and photos of Reese and her teammates don’t fall into the narrow confines of this protected category.
The internet is cluttered with non-pornographic deepfakes aimed at mocking or humiliating Reese — many of which focus on fueling an online rivalry with Clark.
One deepfake video altered Clark’s voice to tell a monotone story about a fake confrontation with Reese. Another altered video made Clark appear to call Reese a “little b−−−−” and tell her to “take the foul and shut the f−−− up” during a postgame interview. One video was labeled as AI-generated. The other wasn’t. Both were shared hundreds of thousands of times on TikTok.
Reese is one of the league’s most constant targets for this type of misinformation. TikTok and YouTube are rife with fabricated storylines that utilize AI-generated images and audio. A search for “Angel Reese” or “Angel Reese Kamilla Cardoso” garners a slew of misinformative videos strewn amid otherwise benign posts from the WNBA and media outlets such as ESPN.
Headlines lean toward the fantastical: “Kamilla Cardoso DESTROYS Angel Reese LIVE on TV — Defends Caitlin Clark!” or “Angel Reese in COMPLETE MELTDOWN After MAJOR Sponsorships Got Cancelled!” These inaccurate posts are typically paired with altered photos that depict Reese crying or being yelled at by a teammate or coach.
Last week, an infographic quickly went viral with a fabricated quote from Reese: “Y’all make $1,400 a week. … I make $1,400 in 7 days.” Reese never said those words, but that didn’t matter. A slew of posters regurgitated the quote, generating millions of impressions on Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok.
These posts are crass and cruel, but they often don’t classify as abusive or illegal. However, when scaled to a factor of hundreds and thousands of posts, these pieces of AI-assisted fake news contribute to an information economy surrounding the WNBA that’s stuffed with falsehoods — a reflection of a broader problem affecting the online world.
“We need to prepare the American public for the reality that so much of what they’re going to see online is manipulated, misleading and false,” Ramalingam said.
Even in these legal gray areas, Ramalingam and Moonshot hope to leverage pressure on the social media platforms to remove problematic or misleading content. Most of these companies claim to operate by user guidelines. When a post violates those guidelines, Moonshot will file formal reports and use the team to lean on companies to expedite the removal or censorship of that post.
Sometimes a single terms-and-conditions complaint is enough to get a video removed. Other posts remain online long after going viral — even if the comments section is flooded with fans noting that a video or picture is falsified or abusive.
“It can start to feel a little bit like a game of Whac-A-Mole,” Ramalingam said. “But it’s a game that is worth playing.”
This problem isn’t going away. For every post the Sky are able to get removed, dozens more will be left up. Abuse, harassment and threats are an inescapable aspect of online life. The proliferation of AI-assisted technology has expanded that reality.
Regardless, Ramalingam and Rawlinson see value in pushing back against this wave of unwanted content.
“A big thing we need to do is hold the platforms accountable,” Ramalingam said. “They have policies that are published on their site, and where they are not abiding by their own policies — where they’re not removing content that absolutely is incontrovertibly against their policies — we need to hold them accountable.”
Ultimately, the Sky know they can’t fix the toxic environment that surrounds their team online.
But if players feel more comfortable — both online and in person — Rawlinson believes the partnership is worth the investment.
“This is not a silver bullet,” she said. “We’re not going to solve this. But we can create a deterrent for those folks who do have ill intent to post aggressive, abusive, harassing messages to players — and then, God forbid, take it from online to offline in real life — to make them think twice to do that.”
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