A study of the 2024 Paris Olympics analysed 2.4 million social media posts and comments from 20,000 athletes and officials across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X, flagging over 152,000 posts or comments as potentially abusive and identifying 8,900 unique accounts sending abusive messages. The monitoring effort focused on public posts and retrospective detection, cataloguing abuse after it had already reached its targets.
Had real-time interception been deployed, much of the direct harassment—particularly the most predatory private contact invisible to public monitoring—could have been blocked before reaching athletes' inboxes. Guardii's athlete-abuse detection module monitors direct messages in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, intercepting grooming, sextortion, sexual harassment and gender-based hostility at the point of transmission rather than merely documenting it after delivery. The platform, a Meta Business Partner backed by Startmate, blocks or flags hostile contact before it reaches the target, preserves evidence for sporting bodies and law enforcement, and employs privacy-preserving pattern detection rather than reading every message. For Olympic competitors and elite athletes facing coordinated abuse from thousands of unique accounts, Guardii's real-time filter could have prevented the harm documented in the Paris study from ever occurring.
