A WNBA Team Hired Counterterrorism Experts to Track the Threats Against Its Players
In late August, the Chicago Sky became the first WNBA franchise to bring in a counterterrorism firm and an extremism-research lab to sift the violent, racist and sexualized threats aimed at its players online, NPR and The Associated Press reported. Analysts built to hunt terrorists are now reading the posts that target women who play basketball — a measure of how far online abuse of female athletes has escalated toward real-world danger.
The Chicago Sky, one of the Women’s National Basketball Association’s franchises, has turned to an unusual set of partners to keep its players safe: a threat-intelligence company whose tools were built to counter terrorism, and an academic laboratory that studies violent extremism. The arrangement, the first of its kind in the league, treats the abuse that fills athletes’ feeds as a security problem rather than an online nuisance.
Terror-hunting tools, pointed at a timeline
The team partnered with Moonshot, a company founded roughly a decade ago to help governments counter terrorism and targeted violence, and with the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, known as PERIL, at American University, NPR reported. Moonshot monitors more than 25 social media and internet platforms — including some where players hold no accounts — and narrows the millions of posts it scans each day down to those carrying direct threats, which a team of human assessors that includes clinical psychologists and social workers reviews and, when warranted, reports to the platforms or to law enforcement, according to The Associated Press.
The partnership was initiated by Sky co-owner Nadia Rawlinson, who read about Moonshot in a technology publication, the AP reported. Elizabeth Neumann, Moonshot’s chief strategy officer, said the company was applying to sports the methods it first developed to help governments counter terrorism and targeted violence, NPR reported.
The numbers behind the alarm
Moonshot’s monitoring of United States Olympic athletes points to a steep rise. Comparing the Paris 2024 Summer Games with the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Games, the firm found sharp per-athlete increases in online threats over the two-year span, NPR reported. “Per athlete, we had seven times more threats of violence, five times more non-consensual, intimate imagery and two times as many credible threats escalated to law enforcement,” Neumann said, according to NPR.
The abuse was not evenly spread. Ninety percent of the threats in that data targeted women athletes, and 80 percent targeted people of color, NPR reported. PERIL, which describes its work as preventing radicalization to violent extremism by strengthening community resilience, has developed materials on identifying and countering misogyny directed at players, the network reported.
From the feed to real life
Players have described the toll directly. Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas said she received death threats and was subjected to racial slurs after a one-game suspension this season, Al Jazeera reported. The vitriol has climbed alongside the league’s rising popularity, and women’s basketball has been pulled into online political and cultural fights; CNN documented a right-wing campaign around the Indiana Fever and a player’s public stance on transgender athletes.
The concern reaches beyond one league. In August, the NCAA and the FBI announced a partnership to help college athletes avoid online sexual exploitation and threats, CNN reported. The Sky’s decision to enlist analysts who once tracked terrorists is a sign of how completely the abuse aimed at prominent women has moved from an online irritation to a question of physical safety — and of how thinly the platforms hosting it have answered.