As the 2025 Asian Games in Aichi and Nagoya draw near, Japanese sports authorities are sending a clear message to internet trolls targeting competing athletes: all abusive activity will be closely monitored and acted upon. After decades of unaddressed harm to competitors across sports, Japan has finally launched a multi-pronged strategy to curb online harassment, a crisis that has devastated athletes’ mental health, impaired on-field performance, and forced many talented competitors to walk away from their careers entirely.
Online abuse is not a uniquely Japanese problem: athletes across every sport and every region have faced dehumanizing, threatening comments on social media for years. But Japan’s response, coming later than many global initiatives, builds on lessons learned from major international events to create a structured framework for protection. At the 2025 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, the Japanese Olympic Committee (JOC) ran its first large-scale social media monitoring program, testing the model ahead of the home Asian Games. Six staff based in Milan and 22 working from Tokyo conducted 24/7 checks for abusive content targeting Japanese athletes, combining manual reviews with AI-powered search tools to identify harmful posts. The team collaborated directly with major social platforms including Meta — owner of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — and domestic tech giant LINE Yahoo to remove violating content. Across the course of the Games, the JOC requested the removal of nearly 2,000 abusive posts, successfully securing the takedown of approximately 600 of the most harmful entries.
This successful test run has paved the way for expanded protection at the upcoming Asian Games. Not only will the JOC repeat its monitoring program for Japanese athletes, but event organizers are rolling out a broader initiative to protect competitors from all participating nations. For JOC officials, the pilot program at the Milan-Cortina Games provided invaluable insight into the scale and nature of online harassment targeting athletes. “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.”
JOC official Misa Chida, who participated in the Milan-Cortina monitoring effort, explained that even a single harsh comment can cause lasting harm. Many athletes respond by stepping back from social media entirely to avoid abuse — a choice that means they also miss out on the overwhelming majority of positive, supportive messages from fans. “Even a single negative comment can cut deeply,” Chida told AFP. “Athletes don’t want to see things like that, so a lot of them choose not to look at social media at all, and that means they miss the 99 percent of messages that are supportive. That’s a real shame.” Chida added that as more athletes and support staff become aware of these protection initiatives, it directly boosts competitors’ psychological safety, letting them focus on competition rather than fearing online harassment.
Beyond in-house monitoring, Japan has added legal support for athletes facing abuse, a step that experts say fills a long-empty gap in the country’s sports ecosystem. Lawyer Shun Takahashi leads a seven-person legal group founded in 2024 specifically to support athletes targeted by online trolls. Takahashi notes that Japan was relatively slow to adopt formal protections compared to other nations, and many athletes face cultural barriers to speaking out about abuse. Many are raised with the expectation that they must always project strength, leading to fears that acknowledging the harm of harassment will lead coaches to see them as unfit to compete and bench them. Takahashi’s group serves as a confidential “safe haven” for athletes to seek support without risking their careers.
One high-profile case the group supported underscores the severity of the abuse many athletes face: professional baseball player Taiki Sekine took legal action against online abusers last year after receiving threatening messages including “I hope your whole family dies in an accident”. Sekine has secured multiple civil settlements and filed criminal complaints against the worst offenders, a process that was simplified by the fact that all abusers in the case were based in Japan. Cross-border abuse cases remain far harder to prosecute, a persistent challenge for global anti-harassment efforts. Takahashi says that visible legal action carries a strong deterrent effect, particularly since most online trolls are teenagers or young adults who often underestimate the legal consequences of their actions. “It makes them realise the risk involved,” he explained.
While Japan’s new proactive approach marks a major shift from years of inaction, stakeholders across the board agree that there is still a long way to go to fully solve the problem. During the Milan-Cortina monitoring program, less than a third of the posts the JOC requested to be removed were actually taken down by social media companies. Though Takeshita emphasized that tech platforms have been cooperative, he acknowledged that platform’s standards for what counts as offensive content often do not align with the JOC’s perspective. “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.”
Japan’s effort joins a growing global movement to protect athletes from online abuse: the International Olympic Committee ran a multi-language monitoring program covering more than 35 languages at the 2024 Paris Games, and similar initiatives have been launched by governing bodies in football and tennis. As the Asian Games approach, Japan’s expanding framework sets a new example for regional event organizers, while highlighting ongoing work needed to align platform policies with athlete protection needs.