The organization responsible for the Wimbledon tournament, the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), employs the Threat Matrix platform. This service, created by the data analytics company Signify, utilizes artificial intelligence for tracking publicly accessible social media profiles.
A specialized group of analysts then manually examines the content identified by the platform, which includes activity on X, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. They then escalate any content that is deemed to be offensive or pose a threat.
During the Wimbledon championships, this system was applied to all participants in the men’s and women’s competitions, covering both singles and doubles matches. It also included players in the mixed doubles category, those involved in qualifying rounds, match officials, and the official Wimbledon social media accounts.
By the end of the quarter-final matches, a total of 2,916 posts or comments had been confirmed as offensive, threatening, or discriminatory and were reported to the respective social media platforms.
Among these, 132 were categorized as posing a “moderate” or “high” level of threat. These cases underwent further investigation to determine if security measures or legal intervention were necessary. It was found that individuals described as “angry gamblers” were responsible for 37% of all detected instances of abuse.
This data was derived from a preliminary total of 228,060 posts, encompassing both positive and negative sentiments, that were identified by the system because they were directed at the monitored social media handles.
Since the previous year’s Wimbledon event, updates have been implemented to the Threat Matrix system. These enhancements aim to capture newly emerging terms and to address troll accounts that repeatedly post the same abusive messages.
The observed increase in incidents compared to the previous year might be attributed to these changes in how abusive accounts are operated.
