Impact Awards: SixPivot stops online abuse in its tracks with Social Protect

SixPivot was the winner of the Innovation Award at the 2025 techpartner.news Impact Awards for Social Protect, a tool that can stop online abuse from ever reaching its intended targets. 

Social Protect uses artificial intelligence to identify and delete harmful content from a range of social media platforms in real-time.

Brisbane-based SixPivot developed the solution after a cyber bullying incident that involved one of the staff’s family members.

While it was created as a way of protecting social media users between the ages of 13 to 15, it has proven to be valuable to a far broader group of customers.

Social Protect was developed through JumpSpiders, SixPivot’s innovation incubator where software product concepts are developed and commercialised.

Social Protect founder Shane Britten said the product was created to help social media users protect themselves and their followers.

“SocialProtect keeps full control in the hands of social media account owners – there is no need to share your passwords or credentials with it, it can’t post as you or read your direct messages, it just keeps you free from abuse,” he said.

The standard version of Social Protect is free and monitors over 2 million words and phrases in more than 100 languages.

A subscription to the premium version unlocks features such as custom keywords, unlimited account connections, and a record of deleted content.

For business customers, Social Protect Pro offers organisation-wide deployment, administrative dashboards for monitoring deleted comments and platform statistics, custom education hubs, abuser identification capabilities, and white-labelling options.

SixPivot initially targeted the elite sports market to help combat online abuse of athletes, securing an implementation with the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) in the US.

More locally, the NRL's Wests Tigers head of wellbeing Tim Grant said the Social Protect team were key in providing education on the benefits and risks of social media.

"Social Protect is an essential part of our player development and wellbeing programmes, which has significantly enhanced our ability to support players in managing their online presence and digital wellbeing,” he said.

The company expanded into education and news, as well as politics, where during an election period it removed more than 300 abusive comments a day, all directed at one politician.

After spinning out of IT consultancy SixPivot, Social Protect expanded its reach through partners, including Active Fence and major Australian telecommunications companies.

SixPivot claimed Social Protect removed over a million abusive or hateful comments in 2024 and identified more than 2,000 individual abusers. 

Of the comments removed, 31% were for spam/scams, 23% for offensive language, 21% for sexualised content, 17% for racism and/or ethnic hatred, and 8% were for custom keywords.

Psychologist and cyber safety mental health advocate Stacey Joyce said Social Protect is “setting a new standard for digital wellbeing".

“Social Protect’s groundbreaking technology fosters community safety and champions mental health in the online sphere. Its transformative power is awe-inspiring,” she said.