In a world first for a sporting organisation and in the interests of athlete welfare, Swimming Australia has launched “FLICKBAIT” to combat the slew of non-factual social media posts, mostly generated by AI.
Housed here with examples below, FLICKBAIT is a new resource to fight social media disinformation and to build media and public information literacy.
From anti-transgender narratives about Olympic swimmers to fabricated comments from high performance coaches, Swimming Australia has tracked sports and human-interest pages promoting fabricated content.
While positive steps have been taken to work with eSafety Commissioner, DFAT and META, and this work remains ongoing, Swimming Australia has received a number of reports from current athletes and family members about fake content.
Think a story doesn’t sound right, check out here if we have flagged it as ‘Flickbait’. **This does not endorse posts as accurate that do not appear here**
Swimming Australia’s National Wellbeing and Engagement Manager Linley Frame said: “We have seen a rise in the number of reports from our athletes and members of the Swimming Australia community of posts which are clearly from fake accounts and many have caused great distress,” she said.
“We will continue to work hard to close down these posts with the relevant bodies but rather than sit back and see these posts liked, shared and commented on, we thought it was our responsibility to be proactive and denounce the content as FLICKBAIT.
“We will continue to address this challenge to counter misinformation – and disinformation – and we hope this resource proves an additional valuable tool in safeguarding our athletes and our community.
“We will do what we can and this is not to say that posts we haven’t addressed are accurate.”
Olympic gold medallist and world-record holder Mollie O’Callaghan has been a target of social media falsehoods with a claim she would forgo the next Olympics if a trans athlete were allowed to compete.
The page was eventually taken down but not before some damage was done with O’Callaghan forced to defend herself publicly and privately.
“It’s a scary thing. You don’t want people impersonating you and making statements that aren’t true. I had to remind everyone to check their sources and FLICKBAIT is a great first step for the public – and media – to rule out the fakes,” she said.
“I hope other sports follow suit.”
