Japan is stepping up its fight against online abuse, sending a clear message to anyone targeting athletes at this year’s Asian Games: Your actions are being tracked.
Around the world, athletes face a steady stream of online hostility that can erode performance, damage mental health and, in some cases, drive them out of sport altogether.
Japan has not been immune. Now, sports authorities are moving to confront the issue, deploying legal support teams and monitoring social media platforms for harmful content.
“Even a single negative comment can cut deeply,” Japanese Olympic Committee official Misa Chida told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“Athletes don’t want to see things like that, so many avoid social media entirely, which means missing the overwhelming majority of supportive messages.
“That’s a real shame.”
Chida was part of a dedicated JOC unit tasked with tracking online abuse during the Milan-Cortina Olympics in February.
Six staff members in Milan and 22 in Tokyo checked around the clock for posts abusing Japanese athletes, using both manual and AI searches.
They worked in conjunction with Meta, owner of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, and Japanese company LINE Yahoo.
The team asked social media companies to take down almost 2,000 posts and succeeded in having nearly 600 removed.
Social media companies have often been accused of not doing enough to crack down on abuse on their platforms.
The JOC said it plans to repeat its monitoring activities at the Asian Games, which will be held in Nagoya and the wider Aichi area from Sept. 19 to Oct. 4.
In addition, Asian Games organizers told AFP they will run a broader monitoring program aimed at protecting athletes from all competing countries.
“We now understand what kinds of comments appear on a daily basis and how they upset athletes,” said JOC official Hirofumi Takeshita.
“We’ve learned how much energy we need to devote to this.”
The JOC is not the first sporting organization to carry out a social media monitoring program.
The International Olympic Committee ran one in more than 35 languages at the 2024 Paris Games, and there have also been initiatives in football and tennis.
“As awareness of these initiatives grows among athletes, staff and everyone working on the ground, that in itself contributes to a greater sense of psychological safety,” said Chida.
Japan has been relatively late to the effort, according to lawyer Shun Takahashi, who leads a seven-member legal group dedicated to protecting athletes from online abuse.
Takahashi said his group, founded in 2024, is a “safe haven” for athletes, many of whom feel uncomfortable talking about the issue.
“They worry that showing vulnerability might lead a coach to bench them or that others will see them as weak,” he said.
“Many athletes are raised with the idea that they must always be strong, and they don’t want to be perceived otherwise.”
Takahashi’s group offered support in the case of Taiki Sekine, a professional baseball player who last year took legal action against online abusers.
Sekine, who received messages such as “I hope your whole family dies in an accident,” has won several settlements and lodged criminal complaints in the most serious cases.
The domestic nature of Sekine’s case made it easier to prosecute than social media abuse that crosses international borders.
Takahashi said legal action has “a deterrent effect” on online trolls, many of whom he said are in their teens or early 20s.
“It makes them realize the risk involved,” he said.
But while Japan is now taking a proactive approach to online abuse, those involved say there is still a long way to go.
Less than a third of the posts that the JOC’s Olympic monitoring team requested be deleted were actually taken down by social media companies.
Takeshita said the tech firms were “very cooperative” but acknowledged their view of which posts were offensive did not always match.
“Yes, there was a gap, but it was a gap that we were able to identify by actually doing this work,” he said.
“That’s better than having an unidentified gap that never gets bridged. Now that we know where the differences lie, we can work to close them.”
