Japan Olympic Committee creates a dedicated team to respond to malicious comments following the Milan Winter Olympics

NHK reported on the 23rd that the Japanese Olympic Committee (JOC) confirmed about 120 posts containing personal attacks against athletes on social media (SNS) as of the 22nd, the fourth day of the 2026 Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, and requested the platform operator to delete them.

In order to prevent players from being harmed by malicious comments, JOC has six agents, including lawyers, stationed in Nagoya during the tournament to respond to slander and slander on the Internet and social media (SNS).

According to JOC, malicious posts were discovered one after another right after the start of the game. Most of the content was insulting or sexually degrading to the players.

Yoichiro Kakitani, a former Japanese national soccer team player who played in the J-League, told NHK that he suffered from depression due to the influence of malicious comments he received during his time as a player, and appealed to players to refrain from indiscriminately posting malicious comments about players.

During the Milan Winter Olympics held in February, JOC responded to malicious comments based in two locations, Italy and Japan, and found 355,975 posts of concern about defamation. A request for deletion was made to the platform operator for 1,913 cases.

At the time, about 1.2% of the SNS posts that JOC monitored during the Milan Winter Olympics were posts suspected of being slander or slander, with comments frequently attacking athletes.