Why The WNBA’s Chicago Sky Struck a Deal With a Counter-Terrorism Startup
The team hopes Moonshot, which has worked with the U.S. government and Team USA, can stem a tide of online abuse.
During the first game of the WNBA season, Chicago Sky star forward Angel Reese received a hard foul from her archrival, the Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark. The tough basketball play sparked a maelstrom of hate speech that snowballed across social media, an episode that highlighted how quickly such abusive discourse travels and how the league struggles to address it, as I wrote in The Arena in May.
As of today, Reese and the Sky will now receive additional protection from abuse thanks to a new partnership between the Chicago team and Moonshot, a digital counter-terrorism company which has worked with the U.S. government and the U.S. Olympic team to assess and combat online threats. The agreement is the first between a WNBA team and a national security service provider—a relationship which came to fruition directly from my reporting on online harassment five weeks ago.
“Online abuse can happen to anyone, and it has—across the team and coaching staff as well as associated people that are in those players and coaches lives,” Nadia Rawlinson, co-owner and operating chairman of the Sky, told me. “We feel it’s important to step in and be a heat shield for them as an organization.”