Artificial intelligence protects tennis players at Roland Garros

"Cyberbullying" is the use of electronic communication for the purpose of harassing a person through intimidating, threatening, or disparaging messages.

It is especially common among younger generations, often elusive for the parents of children who experience it, and therefore extremely dangerous because it can leave enormous consequences for mental health and psyche. But it is not only children who face it.

On the eve of its 127th edition, Roland Garros decided to stand in the way of this practice, and offered all participants a tool for protection against bullying through social networks. All tennis players can opt for a personal bodyguard, but not the one the average person imagines. It will not be men in black, with intimidating looks and facial expressions, dark glasses, girded with weapons, following in players' footsteps.

It will be a technology simply called "Bodyguard".

And if research is to be believed, Novak Djokovic is the most frequent victim of "cyberbullying" among all tennis players. On a time sample of 16 months, the French study showed that there is no one more "hated" on the Internet than Serbian ace and Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka.

According to research by the World Sports Network, which measured the social sensitivity of tweets in which tennis players were marked in a negative light, as well as public reactions to certain Facebook posts, the highest percentage of non-affirmative tweets was directed at Djokovic (around 15%). That is, every sixth tweet that mentions the Serb is negative, while 11% of reactions on Facebook that refer to Novak have an undertone of anger.

For the sake of comparison, Stefanos Tsitsipas has almost identical Twitter statistics, while Carlos Alcaraz with six percent and Daniil Medvedev with five percent are much less hated.

Roland Garros paid a lot of attention to protecting the mental health of tennis players, and it is the Bodyguard platform that will do the key part of the job and will be available to all tennis players completely free of charge. The technology itself came to life in 2017, and its goal, in addition to 'mental hygiene', was to preserve sports and tennis values, that is, barriers for people whose only goal is to spread aggression and hatred through social networks.

The system uses artificial intelligence to filter and moderate comments in real time, and each comment is analyzed in less than 200 milliseconds. A whole team of linguists has created templates that help ensure that the context is not overlooked, that no insults or threats slip through, but also that freedom of thought is not threatened and censorship does not occur. "Bodyguard" will cover Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok and Discord.