The AFL says it lacks confidence in systems to find and punish online abusers, citing the unwillingness of an Indigenous player whose partner was threatened with sexual violence to go to police.
AFL officials and players have made submissions to a federal government committee, urging action to help combat online abuse.
The AFL's inclusion and social policy general manager, Tanya Hosch, says the prevalance of fake online accounts, set up by people who don't need to reveal their identity, is "the biggest difficulty".
"It means it can often be incredibly hard to trace these people," Hosch has told the House of Representatives' Select Committee on Social Media and Online Safety.
"We put our reports of this material through our integrity department which is staffed almost entirely by former police who have got significant experience in investigation work.
" ... It frequently leads us to a dead-end because of the identities not known to us."
Hosch said owners of social media companies should take greater responsibility for content on their platforms.
"The other thing is that we don't have a lot of confidence in the system any more," she said.
"So asking players ... to make the decision to go and report an incident to the police themselves becomes very, very difficult.
"And we have had a couple of instances last year where some of the abuse was just egregious.
"And certainly, from advice I had from our integrity team, it would be seen as a criminal act because it was promoting physical and sexual violence and it was directing that at the partner of one of our Aboriginal players.
"But no matter how much support we tried to offer and other players offered to this particular individual, they weren't willing to go and report it to the police, which is really the last resort.
"It seems to us that there have to be other ways to deal with that."
Hosch said the AFL can't make reports to police or the eSafety Commissioner on behalf of players.
"It can be very difficult for them to make a decision to have to put a lot of time and effort and energy into a formal complaint, particularly if they are not confident it will result in anything at the end," she said.
"And certainly the threshold of what would constitute getting the eSafety commissioner involved is still reasonably high."
The AFL's head of mental health and wellbeing, Kate Hall, told the committee lowering the threshold for what constituted harmful content would be an important step.
"The onus is still on the victim to have the psychological capacity, readiness, energy, trust in the system, to meet any kind of resolution," she said.
"And that's not a very victim-centric or survivor-centric mindset. It doesn't empower people, particularly in our industry, to act.
"There's definitely ways in which after the initial abuse has occurred, that just by pursuing that, it actually exacerbates the distress of the individual."
