WTA Director of Safeguarding and Integrity Lindsay Brandon joined the Love All Podcast to talk about how the tour protects its players on site and online, and why Signify's Threat Matrix is a key part of that work.
Speaking to host Blair Henley and four-time Grand Slam champion Kim Clijsters, Lindsay set out how wide the WTA's safeguarding remit now runs. It covers everyone holding a tour credential, from junior players to coaches, family members and staff.
Online abuse is a big part of Lindsay’s caseload. Players including Coco Gauff and Iva Jovic have been targeted, and the WTA uses Signify's Threat Matrix service to monitor players' social media for hate speech, sexism, racism and threats of violence, so the tour knows what its players are facing and can act on it.
Lindsay Brandon of the WTA talks about online abuse and how the WTA work with Threat Matrix to tackle it.
Knowing which players need support, before they ask
Threat Matrix monitors public social media around the clock, using AI to flag abuse and threats across 32 categories in more than 100 languages. Signify's analysts then verify and assess what the technology finds, so the WTA receives intelligence rather than a raw feed of posts.
For Lindsay and her team, that intelligence arrives proactively. They can see which players are being targeted, how heavily, and what kind of abuse is involved, without waiting for anyone to report it.
When a player is being targeted, the WTA can contact the player and their agent directly. The first conversation is about wellbeing: how the player is doing, whether they've seen the abuse, and what support would help. Where content crosses into threats, it becomes a safeguarding matter, with Signify's investigators able to look into serious cases and, where the evidence supports it, help identify the people responsible.
The team can also offer practical tools to reduce a player's exposure, from comment filtering and account settings to escalation with the social media platforms.
Going after the source: the Bad Actor Program
Lindsay was clear about who is behind much of the abuse. "The people perpetuating this abuse are largely angry gamblers," she told the podcast, adding that many of them bet across several sports, not tennis alone.
Tennis is especially exposed. There's a match on somewhere almost every day of the year, betting markets run point by point, and when a bet loses there is one named individual to blame.
Lindsay Brandon explains the new Bad Actor program and how it focuses on real-world action to deter and sanction angry gamblers evidenced in sending targeted abuse to Tennis Players.
The Bad Actor Program, established by Signify and US integrity specialists IC360, is built to deal with exactly that. Verified intelligence from Threat Matrix is matched against the customer data of participating sports betting and prediction market operators, which now include Fanatics Sportsbook, DraftKings, Novig and Kalshi. Where an abuser turns out to be one of their customers, the operator can act under its own rules, up to and including permanent account closure.
Lindsay compared chasing anonymous abusers on social media to a game of Whac-a-Mole: remove one account and another appears. Bad Actor changes that equation. An abuser can open a new social account in minutes, but losing their betting account hits the very thing that triggered the abuse in the first place.
She also made the point that no single organisation can fix this alone, and that meaningful change needs buy-in from the tours, the operators and the social media companies. The WTA, Signify and a growing list of operators are already working that way.