NCAA Study: Sports Betting Among Most Common Online Abuse Topics


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Abusive comments related to sports betting and match fixing accounted for more than 12% of the abuse NCAA athletes, coaches and officials faced on social media during championships.

That is according to a study released last week from Signify Group, which partnered with the NCAA to “identify, analyze and investigate online abuse threats” against the three groups during select tournaments in 2023 and 2024.

Those involved in the men’s and women’s March Madness basketball tournaments received the most abuse by far, receiving 80% of messages identified as abusive, discriminatory or threatening by Signify’s AI service Threat Matrix. Those messages accounted for 73% of all of the sports betting-related messages.

NCAA study details

Signify started with a dataset including 1.3 million posts or comments that directly targeted the profiles of athletes, coaches and officials involved in the events. It then analyzed more than 72,000 messages flagged as abuse by Threat Matrix.

Those messages on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter concerned performances in tournaments and championship matches for baseball, basketball, football, gymnastics, softball and volleyball. The messages were all public, meaning no private communications were analyzed.

That led to 5,020 comments targeting 4,027 accounts:

Signify also helped get some of the abusive content removed. For example, 92% of sexual abuse for gymnastics came from Twitter bot accounts that were suspended, with their content removed after Signify reported the messages.

Sports betting behind sexual, sexist abuse

The largest subset of abuse was sexual abuse, which was involved in 18% of the verified abusive comments. That was followed by sexist comments at 14%.

There were 743 specific comments concerning match fixing and sports betting. That was more comments than other categories including racism (10%), homophobia (9%) and violence (6%).

The true number of messages concerning sports betting is higher, the study noted. Some messages that fell into other categories also included betting-related abuse.

NCAA wants sports betting ban on players

The NCAA is pushing for states to ban betting on college player props. NCAA President Charlie Baker said ending those bets would cut down on player harassment and would help avoid any match fixing issues.

Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts, noted this summer that he wishes sports betting “stayed in Las Vegas.” Baker introduced a sports betting bill of his own in Massachusetts, saying it was one of the issues he would be “happy” to sign and legalize in his last year as governor.

The Responsible Online Gaming Association also announced in September a campaign to better educate college athletes about sports betting.

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