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16 April 2026: Athletes, coaches, referees, grassroots participants – no one is off limits when it comes to online abuse in the sporting world, and the negative effects flow much further than the target of the abuse.
Managing online abuse and ensuring the safe access to sport participation is no simple task, but University of Canberra researchers, co-funded by Sport Integrity Australia, have developed a toolbox of strategies sporting bodies can draw from to mitigate the abuse and safeguard their participants.
While online abuse is a broader societal issue, the researchers noted it’s particularly prevalent in sport thanks to factors including live audiences, gambling and normalised aggression, and that women and participants with marginalised identities can disproportionately experience it.
Dr Joanna Wall Tweedie, the lead researcher from UC’s Research Institute for Sport and Exercise (UCRISE) , said there is “no magic bullet” for combatting online abuse, but recognising the issue and knowing there are strategies that can be employed are the first steps for a sports organisation.
“The presumption is often that they have to do something really extreme and really expensive or there's nothing you can do,” she said.
“But there are ways in which you can identify inflection points where you can intervene. That could be directly removing the abuse, for example, or offering psychological support where required. And the other piece is just making sure that participants know there is something that can be done.”
Dr Tweedie also stressed the importance of incorporating a participant voice in developing mitigating strategies.
The research, co-authored by Aaron C.T. Smith and Catherine Ordway, examined a sample of 19 international and Australian major sporting organisations and their approaches to address online abuse to identify common triggers and factors contributing to online abuse, as well as barriers and conduits to mitigating strategies to compile their toolbox.
“The organisations we examined have taken that first step of asking ‘what does online abuse look like for my sport?’ They’re all at different stages of addressing it, but there are some really good, proactive measures being taken,” Dr Tweedie said.
Measuring online abuse, be it through surveys, focus groups or even with artificial intelligence via data science firms, is an important step.
“That can give you an overview of what the problem looks like for your sport… often you can see a persistent noise of online abuse, but then spikes at particular times and that can help identify what are the contributing factors, what has triggered it and then you can sort of proactively try to address those.”
The research found resources – financial and human – are a major constraint on an organisation’s ability to respond to, prevent or manage online abuse, but Dr Tweedie said if some effort is put in to understand how the problem is manifesting in the sport and potential triggers of the abuse, some interventions don’t need a lot of resources.
She pointed to an example of one sport organisation that found referees would see a spike in abuse after press conferences if coaching staff commented on their decisions or performance.
“They put mechanisms in place to allow dialogue between the coaching staff and the players and referees, to review matches away from the public setting of the press conference,” she said.
“That also had a really positive flow-on effect in terms of more transparency around decisions that are made.”
The research suggested that online abuse can impact mental health and wellbeing, body image, performance, raise safety fears and cause withdrawal from social media – which can in turn affect sponsorships and promotion opportunities.
But Dr Tweedie says online abuse affects more people than just the targets, with the “ripple effect” making it more important for sports to address it.
“If one athlete or participant is targeted, and if it's one with a high profile, that doesn't just impact that single person. It impacts those people that care directly for the individual, but also others who care about the sport and those who witness it – and online abuse can be very public,” she said.
The researchers found a key element of mitigating abuse was victims having a willingness to report it, as well as simple reporting processes, but there was still a stigma that stopped people at all levels of participation from reporting abuse and accepting help.
“At the higher level, there's still a belief that this is part of the job, so that definitely can be a barrier to reporting it, but at the lower levels of sport, the barrier can be knowing how or where to report it,” Dr Tweedie said.
She said she was surprised at how widespread the problem was through sports, reaching all the way to the grassroots level.
“It is easy to think that just the big names are targeted. But it can impact anyone within a sport in different ways, so this really is a problem that all organisations have to address. It's not just at the elite end of sport.”
Dr Tweedie said there was an appetite among the many of the sport organisations to work together to pool knowledge and resources to combat the issue.
The research has now been released by Sport Integrity Australia to provide better practice recommendations for Australian National Sporting Organisations and National Sporting Organisations for People with Disability.
Professor Julien Périard, Director of UCRISE said the research reflects the Institute’s commitment to promoting equitable access to sport for all by addressing online abuse as a barrier to participation and inclusion.
“Through evidence-based analysis and strong partnerships, including with Sport Integrity Australia, the work advances digital safeguarding in sport and supports broader goals of community wellbeing, participation, and social cohesion,” he said.
The University has designed next research steps that would further understanding of the impacts of online abuse and evaluate the effectiveness of intervention strategies.
The full report can be found here.
