Last week, a tennis player eliminated in the previous phase of Roland Garros had to accept that 70% of the messages received on his social networks came from haters, that kind of hater fans who poison the internet. The problem is not circumstantial but has become an epidemic. “Being an individual sport, defenselessness is accentuated in tennis. It harms the mental health of the player, reduces his performance and exposes him to his own followers. It can even affect sponsors, who don't want any kind of racist or homophobic messages around them,” explains Yann Guerin, Bodyguard's sports manager, in conversation with EL MUNDO in the Roland Garros player area.
Bodyguard is a French application born five years ago in Nice by Charles Cohen whose objective is to protect the accounts of individuals and companies from insults or offenses. This year it has signed an agreement with the French Tennis Federation to shield, without exercising censorship, the official account of the tournament and that of the federation itself, as well as that of any player who wishes to do so.. “In general, tennis players are young people who lack all the weapons to handle their overexposure on the networks,” our interlocutor points out, without leaving his laptop for a moment.
Alarmed by news of the suicides of young victims of cyberbullying, Cohen created this protective weapon to fight a social problem.. “Ours is a mission, more than a business objective,” says Guerin, without revealing the benefits that, logically, this ambitious initiative generates, estimated in the spring of last year at nine million euros.
His landing in football came in the French League. “Now we are entering Spain through an intermediary company. In France they also face problems of racism and homophobia, as has happened now with Vinicius in LaLiga. What happens in the stadium sometimes has its origin or its mouth in the networks”, comments Guerin.
Good reception
At the moment, between 40 or 50 tennis players have scanned the QR code provided by Bodyguard to connect their accounts on the social networks Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube and Discord to the system.. Bodyguard's system moderates comments in real time, analyzing each one in less than 200 milliseconds.. “We have a team of linguists who create word structures to provide the algorithm with the context of the comment in a time that is inaccessible to humans. It is about creating a safe space from a fine analysis, cleaning up the toxic, also detecting the emojis, without people losing the freedom to express themselves or exercise criticism.”
Children of their time, there are not a few tennis players who have recognized something similar to addiction with social networks. Paula Badosa, very active in them since adolescence, to the point that they constituted one of her problems in making the transition from the junior stage to the professional circuit, decided to step aside for a few weeks in order to preserve a certain calm in the face of the ferocity of received attacks.
“Each player has an identification code, a user IP, which could even allow us to initiate legal action through lawyers in order to try to identify the senders of toxic messages,” explains Guerin.. “We also have different filters when looking at comments. For example, a luxury products company is not the same as sports, where there is a lot of passion.”
Aware of the work that the French Tennis Federation had been doing for some years, it was Bodyguard who took the initiative to join the effort. “We have moved fast. They have understood that their responsibility as a public entity is to promote education among young people, as well as diversity, inclusion and the fight against discrimination”. For Caroline Flaissier, general director of the FFT, “the health of the players is a priority for the Roland Garros tournament. We are proud to be the first Grand Slam tournament to offer players a solution that efficiently protects them against cyberbullying so that they can be in top mental condition when competing in the tournament.”
The rollout of the idea, which tentatively ends a week after the conclusion of the tournament, is intended to have further flight. “We are in contact with the International Tennis Federation and with the ATP to continue working throughout the year,” Guerin advances.