Stats Perform Partners With Signify To Monitor Online Abuse

Stats Perform and British ethical data science company Signify Group, have announced a new partnership which aims to monitor social media abuse in sport.

The partnership will see Stats Perform’s Integrity Unit partner with Signify to ‘leverage AI and Machine Learning’ to monitor and identify abuse in real-time.

The pair will expand access to Signify’s Threat Matrix, a proprietary service using AI technology to detect online abuse at scale, by focusing on providing sport industry stakeholders with the service to ‘unmask abusers and identify trends, tactics and technology’ used to send hate online. 

Threat Matrix provides ‘proactive’ monitoring and analysis of millions of open source social media posts across multiple platforms, with monitoring including image and emoji recognition, as well as keywords, phrases and a ‘long list’ of abusive words, terms and profanities in multiple languages. 

The service has been developed over a two-year period and is built on an ‘evidence based and defensible expert approach’ to the screening and assessment of inappropriate, threatening, and unwanted communications directed at public figures.

Carl Mergele, Stats Perform CEO, said: “Our Integrity work at Stats Perform focuses on the protection of sport and that includes athletes and other participants. Sports are under increasing pressure from fans and sponsors to demonstrate moral and social responsibility and our partnership with Signify Group will see the deployment of game-changing AI to protect players, athletes and officials from online racist, homophobic, sexist and other abuse. We are very proud to bring this offering to our clients and it blends perfectly with our approach to sport integrity and our wider ESG commitments.”

Jonathan Hirshler, Signify CEO, commented: “We are delighted to be partnering with Stats Perform to offer Threat Matrix to their unrivalled portfolio of clients. The combination of Stats Perform’s sports industry expertise and Threat Matrix’s bespoke AI powered proactive monitoring and analysis capabilities provides sports stakeholders with an industry leading solution to help protect their athletes and staff from online threat and discriminatory abuse.”