Swimming Australia launches Flickbait to combat social media disinformation

In what is believed to be 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 on Swimming Australia’s website, Flickbait is a new resource to fight social media disinformation and to build media and public information literacy.

The announcement was made as the Dolphins left for the 2026 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, followed by the Pan Pacific and Para Pan Pacific Championships in California.

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 continues to receive reports from current athletes and family members about fake content.

Swimming Australia’s national wellbeing and engagement manager Linley Frame says they have seen a rise in the number of reports from athletes and members of the Swimming Australia community regarding posts that are clearly from fake accounts and many have caused great distress.

“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 to address fake news 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,” she says.

“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.

“I hope other sports follow suit,” she says.

IMAGE: A fake post identified by Flickbait. (Supplied.)