News and Resources

Check out a selection of Moonshot news and resources.

The real-world dangers of online myths

Our Founder & CEO Vidhya Ramalingam took to the TED stage to discuss how information is manipulated online to serve as a justification for violence. We wont be able to fact check our way out of this. Instead of endlessly debating the facts – we need to prepare societies early to encounter information manipulation.

Moonshot in the media

Moonshot featured in PBS Exploring Hate series
Moonshot featured in The Economist’s Now & Next series
Moonshot takes the stage at the Eradicate Hate Global Summit
Moonshot featured in PBS Exploring Hate series
Moonshot featured in The Economist’s Now & Next series
Moonshot takes the stage at the Eradicate Hate Global Summit

Press Releases

WNBA’s Chicago Sky Announces First-of-Its-Kind Partnership with Moonshot to Protect Players from Online Threats and Abuse

Today, the WNBA’s Chicago Sky announced an innovative partnership with Moonshot, a global leader in countering online threats, to leverage national security technology to keep the team’s full roster safe. As the first team in the league to deploy this type of technology, the Chicago Sky is setting the standard for how sports organizations can proactively address online hate, harassment, and abuse targeting athletes.
Moonshot Brings National Security Tech to Sport

Moonshot and CTH Advisors, an investment banking and advisory firm specializing in sports, media and entertainment, have announced a strategic partnership to combat the rising digital threats in the sports industry.

Featured Reports

Building Resilience to Disinformation in Ukraine
Moonshot and Google delivered a groundbreaking initiative to counter Russian disinformation in Ukraine, helping 495,000 Ukrainians resist information warfare during active conflict in 2024. These findings offer critical new insight into how we help populations build protective capabilities for high-pressure environments and extreme conditions.
download
Building Resilience to Misinformation in Europe

The world’s largest prebunking initiative by Moonshot and Google reached 120+ million Europeans with tools to detect manipulation. The outcome: more than 1.5 million voters improved their ability to spot disinformation tactics during the 2024 European Parliamentary elections.

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Adapting Violence Prevention to the Digital World - A Framework for Action

Moonshot’s ‘Adapting Violence Prevention to the Digital World: A Framework for Action’ highlights the current disconnect between online and offline violence prevention, and therefore the urgent need to enhance prevention across the online environment.

download
Moonshot - Practice Standards for Online Referrals

This document outlines Moonshot’s practice standards for intervention programs to respond to violent extremism (VE) and other harms online. The purpose is to ensure all interventions we conduct are ethical, legal, and apply current best practices in violence prevention and safeguarding.

download
Incels: A Guide to Symbols and Terminology

Incels have developed their own coded and highly specialised language, which they use to communicate in online forums and spread their ideology. This guide, produced for Public Safety Canada, aims to demystify the jargon and symbols they employ; provide definitions and context; and demonstrate how language choices fit into a wider system of belief. By doing so, we hope to empower practitioners, front-line service workers and journalists to recognize individuals who are involved with the incel community, understand their unique frames of reference, and ultimately, feel able to engage with them.

download
Understanding and Preventing Incel Violence in Canada

Involuntary celibates (hereafter “incels”) are an online community of men who define themselves by their inability to access sex with women. Their online ecosystem contains violent misogynistic content, much of which is presented and discussed through this ideological lens. In addition to encouraging violence against women, vocal members of many incel communities endorse white supremacy, suicidal ideation, and attacks against members of the public. While there is a growing body of research on online incel communities, to date there has not been a systematic, multi- platform study of how they communicate. This report is intended to improve understanding of the incel community and the scale of the community’s online activity in Canada.

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Countering Radicalization to Violence in Ontario and Quebec: Canada’s First Online-Offline Interventions Model

Over a one year period from April 2021 – March 2022, Moonshot partnered with three violence prevention organizations to deliver an online interventions pilot in two Canadian provinces. The program advertised psychosocial support services to individuals engaging with extremist content online. Access to these services was voluntary, confidential, and anonymous by design. Based on successful results, this program has since been expanded by Public Safety Canada into a multi-year initiative covering five Canadian provinces.

download
Online threat data and real-world incidents – A comparative analysis

Moonshot monitors online threats and encouragement to violence against over 20 different communities and groups in the United States who are often targeted with hate and abuse. Moonshot has conducted an assessment of the relationship between online threats and offline violence. For this analysis, Moonshot compared online threats on Telegram, Gab, 4chan, X, BitChute and Reddit towards Black and LGBTQ+ communities with the FBI’s reported offline hate crimes against these same groups.

download
Extremism across the online gaming ecosystem

The nexus between violent extremism and online gaming has been a pressing issue among researchers, policy makers and law enforcement agencies for some time. Violent perpetrators have used well-known video games to prepare for their attacks. This report, produced for the European Union, investigates the prevalence of extremist content in public spaces across the online gaming ecosystem. It focuses on key extremist narratives and themes, the role of games and influential voices, as well as recruitment and radicalization tactics.

download
The valorization of mass shooters online

In the weeks following the attempted assassination of President Trump on July 13, 2024, the available evidence suggests the perpetrator’s behaviors were similar to mass shooters, more so than the expected behaviors of a political assassin. This highlights the importance of understanding the normalization of and valorization of mass violence online. This report offers critical evidence to inform prevention efforts across the country, and ultimately reduce the risk of violence related to mass shootings.

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Moonshot and Ethics

The Ethics Audit
Moonshot commissions an annual Ethics Audit, conducted by an independent human rights organization.

Check out the Moonshot Ethics Framework here

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WNBA’s Chicago Sky Announces First-of-Its-Kind Partnership with Moonshot to Protect Players from Online Threats and Abuse

CHICAGO (July 1, 2025) — Today, the WNBA’s Chicago Sky announced an innovative partnership with Moonshot, a global leader in countering online threats, to leverage national security technology to keep the team’s full roster safe. As the first team in the league to deploy this type of technology, the Chicago Sky is setting the standard for how sports organizations can proactively address online hate, harassment, and abuse targeting athletes.

Moonshot’s goal is not just to understand the problem, but to solve it. Moonshot’s dedicated team of online security experts will use advanced technology to identify and remove concerning content, assess credible risks, take actions to mitigate harm, and help the Sky interpret the underlying drivers of online abuse.

“Hate and harassment have no place in sports,” said Nadia Rawlinson, Co-owner and Operating Chairman of the Chicago Sky. “Our partnership with Moonshot is about proactively tackling online hate, harassment, and abuse across social media and on the dark web, so our players and coaches can focus on the game of basketball and delighting our fans around the world.”

Chicago Sky players are leaders and role models on and off the court, a position which also places them at increased risk. The Sky’s decisive action to implement this solution reflects the organization’s long-standing commitment to player health and safety, including mental health and well-being.

“The data is abundantly clear. Female athletes, especially women of color and members of the LGBTQIA+ community, face disproportionate amounts of online harassment, abuse, and threats of violence,” continued Rawlinson. “Unfortunately, these incidents are increasing commensurately with the growth in women’s sports, sports betting, and use of artificial intelligence.”

The Chicago Sky-Moonshot partnership comes at a critical time when online threats against athletes and public figures across all industries are rising. For example, according to Moonshot’s findings, 92% of women in public life experience abuse online and 31% of this harassment is sexual in nature.

“We are honored to support the Chicago Sky in this strategic and pioneering effort to protect their players and coaches. Our work is grounded in a decade of national security experience understanding the origins of online abuse and what to do about it,” said Vidhya Ramalingam, CEO of Moonshot. We are grateful for the opportunity to leverage our technology and expertise to advance player safety at a time when interest in women’s sports is at an all-time high. We hope this unique, first-of-its-kind partnership will serve as a model for other sports teams and leagues.”

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The valorization of mass shooters online

In the weeks following the attempted assassination of President Trump on July 13, 2024, the available evidence suggests the perpetrator’s behaviors were similar to mass shooters, more so than the expected behaviors of a political assassin. This highlights the importance of understanding the normalization of and valorization of mass violence online.

Today, Moonshot and Everytown for Gun Safety release a new report offering critical new evidence on how mass shootings are explored, discussed and valorized online. Our findings:

  1. An ecosystem amplifying mass shootings is thriving online. Over an eight month period last year, people discussed or sought information about 167 unique mass shootings, which occurred in 11 different countries across an 80-year period. These ranged from well-publicized shootings like the Columbine shooting to more niche attacks.
  2. A large portion of this ecosystem believes past perpetrators are heroes. This is worrying because those that go on to perpetrate mass violence have often valorized previous killers.
  3. Prevention has to move beyond how well we barricade the doors, and address the underlying drivers of violence. The internet offers underexplored avenues for violence prevention. The perpetrator of the attempted assassination of President Trump sought help for his mental health online. The perpetrator of the Parkland high school shooting searched on Google and YouTube for help with homicidal thoughts and relationship advice in the days and months before his attack. Policy makers should explore proactive interventions to offer would-be shooters critical support at an earlier stage, especially online.

There were almost two mass shootings a day in the US in 2023 – the highest rate on record. This report offers critical evidence to inform prevention efforts across the country, and ultimately reduce the risk of violence related to mass shootings.

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Press Release – Moonshot Brings National Security Tech to Sport

Moonshot, one of the fastest growing companies in the national security space, and CTH Advisors, an investment banking and advisory firm specializing in sports, media and entertainment, have announced a strategic partnership to combat the rising digital threats in the sports industry.

Moonshot has secured over $20 million in U.S. government contracts to protect schools, national infrastructure, and public figures from terrorism. This initiative will leverage that technology to deliver best-in-class national security solutions to elite athletes, officials, and sports organizations.

Moonshot’s technology is already being used by major sports institutions, including the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) and the Southeastern Conference (SEC). Moonshot is responsible for protecting all Team USA athletes from online threats on behalf of USOPC.

As digital threats become more sophisticated, from AI-generated deepfakes to coordinated doxxing, the sports industry is increasingly vulnerable to both reputational and physical harm. One in five players at major international sporting events, such as the Women’s World Cup, experience significant online abuse. Female athletes face disproportionate volumes of online threats, much like the national security space where Moonshot has found that 92% of women in public life experience abuse online.

This critical initiative will address the growing dangers the sports industry faces from online threats and misinformation, and their impact on sport integrity and athlete mental health.

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Building Resilience to Misinformation in Europe

The world’s largest prebunking initiative by Moonshot and Google reached 120+ million Europeans with tools to detect manipulation. The outcome: more than 1.5 million voters improved their ability to spot disinformation tactics during the 2024 European Parliamentary elections.

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download
Adapting Violence Prevention to the Digital World - A Framework for Action

Moonshot’s ‘Adapting Violence Prevention to the Digital World: A Framework for Action’ highlights the current disconnect between online and offline violence prevention, and therefore the urgent need to enhance prevention across the online environment.

Ten years ago, Moonshot launched the first pilot approaches to reach people at risk of violence online and offer access to critical prevention services to prevent violence. Through a decade of structured experimentation, working in partnership with governments and tech platforms, we developed a robust framework for delivering violence prevention online. This approach is now delivered around the world, from Albania, Australia, and Bangladesh to Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. The approach has been adapted to prevent terrorism, targeted violence, and gender-based violence.

Reflecting on a decade of online prevention, the report covers the following areas of focus to support a framework for action:

  • Secondary prevention in practice: The report explains the appropriateness of ‘secondary’ prevention online – emphasising the importance of referral systems, assessment, triage and service provision as core capabilities for secondary prevention. These are critical steps which should be adapted for online delivery.
  • Adapting to the digital world: The report highlights the importance of building an infrastructure that adapts offline strategies for the digital environment, including the importance of creating a skilled provider network, designing effective online outreach strategies, and methods of initiating service delivery in virtual settings.
  • Ethical program design: The report offers ten key principles for designing ethical and evidence-based violence prevention programs – ensuring they respect human rights, implement best practices and avoid harm.

The report contributes critical insight into the urgency for building online intervention capabilities. Sharing ten years of case studies bridging the gap between the online and offline, this research offers guidance to inform the design and delivery of online prevention programs that are both safe and sustainable.

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Moonshot – Practice Standards for Online Referrals

This document outlines Moonshot’s practice standards for intervention programs to respond to violent extremism (VE) and other harms online.

The purpose is to ensure all interventions we conduct are ethical, legal, and apply current best practices in violence prevention and safeguarding.

close
download
Incels: A Guide to Symbols and Terminology

Involuntary celibates (hereafter “incels”) are an online community of men who define themselves by their inability to access sex with women. In addition to encouraging violence against women, vocal members of many incel communities endorse white supremacy, suicidal ideation, and attacks against members of the public. Online violent incel communities represent a risk to both health and public safety. Recent attacks by violent incels have put their capacity for real-world harm beyond doubt. The first step in understanding how to engage with at-risk incels for violence prevention is to understand how they communicate and share their worldview.

Incels have developed their own coded and highly specialised language, which they use to communicate in online forums and spread their ideology. This guide, produced for Public Safety Canada, aims to demystify the jargon and symbols they employ; provide definitions and context; and demonstrate how language choices fit into a wider system of belief. By doing so, we hope to empower practitioners, front-line service workers and journalists to recognize individuals who are involved with the incel community, understand their unique frames of reference, and ultimately, feel able to engage with them.

You can download the French version of the report here.

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download
Understanding and Preventing Incel Violence in Canada

Involuntary celibates (hereafter “incels”) are an online community of men who define themselves by their inability to access sex with women. Incels blame their inability to form sexual relationships on their perceived genetic inferiority, evolutionary traits in female mate selection, and oppressive societal structures. Their online ecosystem contains violent misogynistic content, much of which is presented and discussed through this ideological lens. In addition to encouraging violence against women, vocal members of many incel communities endorse white supremacy, suicidal ideation, and attacks against members of the public. Mass casualty events are regularly celebrated by incels online, and the perpetrators are adopted into a canon of incel “heroes” if they are deemed to be motivated by incel ideology.

While there is a growing body of research on online incel communities, to date there has not been a systematic, multi- platform study of how they communicate. There is also a lack of knowledge about how to identify and assess incel risk factors, and on conducting enhanced interventions to disengage vulnerable individuals from violent incel beliefs.

This report, produced for Public Safety Canada, is intended to improve understanding of the incel community and the scale of the community’s online activity in Canada. We describe the known demographics and size of the at-risk community on several major platforms, map best practices from fields related to the vulnerabilities identified within the incel ecosystem, and present evidence-based recommendations to identify risk and respond to incel-related violence.

You can download the French version of the report here.

close
download
Countering Radicalization to Violence in Ontario and Quebec: Canada’s First Online-Offline Interventions Model

Over a one year period from April 2021 – March 2022, Moonshot partnered with three violence prevention organizations to deliver an online interventions pilot in two Canadian provinces. The program advertised psychosocial support services to individuals engaging with extremist content online. Access to these services was voluntary, confidential, and anonymous by design. Our goal was to offer a secure pathway for at-risk individuals to contact a trained therapist or social worker.

We built this approach around offering integrated care. Together with our intervention partners, we crafted our advertising messages and service websites to emphasize the confidential, non-judgemental support that callers would receive. Individuals who reached out were connected to an interdisciplinary team, which included a therapist, youth engagement workers, a psychiatrist, and other intervention staff who could offer services like counseling, employment support, addiction support, or simply a space to talk.

Our partners were the Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) team in Ontario, and Recherche et Action sur les Polarisations Sociales (RAPS) in Quebec. The Canadian Practitioners Network for the Prevention of Radicalization and Extremist Violence (CPN- PREV) acted as a convening and best practice provider, and supported our pilot evaluation.

Based on successful results, this program has since been expanded by Public Safety Canada into a multi-year initiative covering five Canadian provinces.

You can download the French version of the report here.

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Online threat data and real-world incidents – A comparative analysis

Moonshot monitors online threats and encouragement to violence against over 20 different communities and groups in the United States who are often targeted with hate and abuse.

Understanding this online threat landscape is critical for several reasons. Even if threats leveled online do not escalate into physical attacks or hate crimes, they can still create a climate of fear for those targeted. This climate may force affected individuals to make serious changes to their own lives, for example having to relocate homes or maintain burdensome personal security measures.

Understanding the online threat landscape is also important as it may provide an indication into what is happening offline. This is especially important as data concerning offline incidents often takes months or years to become available. This can help law enforcement and security officials better determine when resources need to be increased or protective measures strengthened, and ultimately may help prevent offline violence.

While the relationship between the online and offline space is complex, the publication of the 2022 FBI Hate Crimes Statistics provides an opportunity to investigate this relationship further. For this analysis, Moonshot compared online threats identified in DVE spaces on Telegram, Gab, 4chan, X, BitChute and Reddit towards Black and LGBTQ+ communities, as recorded in our monthly Threat Bulletin, with the FBI’s reported offline hate crimes against these same groups. Analysis was conducted from July 2022 to December 2022.

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Extremism across the online gaming ecosystem

The nexus between violent extremism and online gaming has been a pressing issue among researchers, policy makers and law enforcement agencies for some time. Violent perpetrators have used well-known video games to prepare for their attacks. Extremists have also used gaming platforms to disseminate propaganda, radicalize or recruit others, and have created or altered video games to share their ideologies. The gamification of extremist discourse, including threats of violence, has also allowed extremists to mask or trivialise their violent intentions towards others.

However, online gaming communities and certain game genres, such as first-person shooter games, have also been disproportionately stigmatized as a result of these events. Given the distinctive and complex radicalisation journey of each individual, it can be difficult to identify drivers of radicalisation that are unique to the online gaming ecosystem – which is itself a highly complex and variable space. Large-scale data-driven studies can help us to better understand how violent extremism manifests within gaming communities and on gaming-related platforms.

This report, produced for the European Union, investigates the prevalence of extremist content in public spaces across the online gaming ecosystem. It focuses on key extremist narratives and themes, the role of games and influential voices, as well as recruitment and radicalization tactics. This report features qualitative and quantitative analysis of extremist content across gaming spaces on Discord, 4chan, Gamer Uprising, incels.is and Steam.

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download
Building Resilience to Disinformation in Ukraine

Moonshot and Google delivered a groundbreaking initiative to counter Russian disinformation in Ukraine, helping 495,000 Ukrainians resist information warfare during active conflict in 2024. These findings offer critical new insight into how we help populations build protective capabilities for high-pressure environments and extreme conditions.

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