AthleteShield
A personal app for pro and semi-pro athletes that monitors their name and accounts across platforms, alerts them in real time to high-severity abuse, and routes them to counseling, legal aid, or police reporting.
Individual professional and semi-professional athletes in the UK who are public targets on social media
- Personal mention watchlist across X, Instagram, TikTok, and forums with severity-based push alerts
- Anonymous or named reporting to the platform with templated hate-speech report text
- Directory of UK-specific support: Kick It Out, Sporting Chance, Mind, and local hate-crime reporting
- Evidence locker that stores screenshots and metadata for up to 12 months in case the athlete later reports
After the Wigan Nsemba arrest and a string of similar incidents, athletes are being told to 'speak up' but given no tooling; an individual-facing app turns club statements into personal action.
Strong institutional demand evidenced by UK Sport's Dec 2025 nationwide rollout for Olympic/Paralympic athletes and Kick It Out's record-level abuse reports across professional football.UK Sport strikes pioneering partnership to safeguard Olympic and Paralympic athletes from social media abuse ↗Kick It Out end of season report: record level of abuse targeting players ↗
UK Sport has already deployed 'Social Protect', an AI app doing near-identical abuse detection, filtering, takedown routing and reporting for British Olympic athletes — only narrow gap is semi-pro/non-Olympians and the counseling/legal/police routing.Olympic stars given protection from online abuse by AI app ↗UK Sport strikes pioneering partnership to safeguard Olympic and Paralympic athletes from social media abuse ↗
Hard to monetise: UK Sport's Social Protect is government-funded/free for elite athletes, individual semi-pros earn modest wages and are unlikely to self-pay, and club/CSP B2B sales are slow with thin price tolerance.UK Sport strikes pioneering partnership to safeguard Olympic and Paralympic athletes from social media abuse ↗Cyber abuse protection for athletes and entourage members at Milano Cortina 2026 ↗
Structural and worsening problem: record abuse reports, regulator-funded national rollout, IOC expanding the service to Milano-Cortina 2026, and SafeSport International publishing a 2026 policy paper — issue will outlast any single incident.Safeguarding in Sport: Online Abuse of Athletes (PDF) ↗Cyber abuse protection for athletes and entourage members at Milano Cortina 2026 ↗
Core abuse-detection/filtering is now commoditised; harder parts are platform API access for true real-time alerting, plus integration with counseling/legal/police workflows for the routing layer — feasible but not trivial.How AI app is protecting Olympians targeted by 'unacceptable' online abuse ↗